Skip to main content

Learn about Astra Trident

Contributors juliantap

Astra Trident is a fully-supported open source project maintained by NetApp as part of the Astra product family. It has been designed to help you meet your containerized application's persistence demands using industry-standard interfaces, such as the Container Storage Interface (CSI).

What is Astra?

Astra makes it easier for enterprises to manage, protect, and move their data-rich containerized workloads running on Kubernetes within and across public clouds and on-premises.

Astra provisions and provides persistent container storage built on Astra Trident. It also offers advanced application-aware data management functionality, such as snapshot, backup and restore, activity logs, and active cloning for data protection, disaster/data recovery, data audit, and migration use-cases for Kubernetes workloads.

What is Astra Trident?

Astra Trident enables consumption and management of storage resources across all popular NetApp storage platforms, in the public cloud or on premises, including ONTAP (AFF, FAS, Select, Cloud, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP), Element software (NetApp HCI, SolidFire), Azure NetApp Files service, and Cloud Volumes Service on Google Cloud.

Astra Trident is a Container Storage Interface (CSI) compliant dynamic storage orchestrator that natively integrates with Kubernetes. Astra Trident runs as a single Controller Pod plus a Node Pod on each worker node in the cluster. Refer to Astra Trident architecture for details.

Astra Trident also provides direct integration with the Docker ecosystem for NetApp storage platforms. The NetApp Docker Volume Plugin (nDVP) supports the provisioning and management of storage resources from the storage platform to Docker hosts. Refer to Deploy Astra Trident for Docker for details.

Note If this is your first time using Kubernetes, you should familiarize yourself with the Kubernetes concepts and tools.

Take the Astra Trident test drive

To take a test drive, request access to the "Easily Deploy and Clone Persistent Storage for Containerized Workloads" NetApp Test Drive using a ready-to-use lab image. The test drive provides a sandbox environment with a three-node Kubernetes cluster and Astra Trident installed and configured. This is a great way to familiarize yourself with Astra Trident and explore its features.

Another option is the kubeadm Install Guide provided by Kubernetes.

Note Don't use a Kubernetes cluster that you build using these instructions in a production environment. Use the production deployment guides provided by your distribution for production-ready clusters.

Kubernetes integration with NetApp products

The NetApp portfolio of storage products integrates with many aspects of a Kubernetes cluster, providing advanced data management capabilities, which enhance the functionality, capability, performance, and availability of the Kubernetes deployment.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a fully managed AWS service that lets you launch and run file systems powered by the NetApp ONTAP storage operating system.

Azure NetApp Files

Azure NetApp Files is an enterprise-grade Azure file share service, powered by NetApp. You can run your most demanding file-based workloads in Azure natively, with the performance and rich data management you expect from NetApp.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a software-only storage appliance that runs the ONTAP data management software in the cloud.

Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud is a cloud native file service that provides NAS volumes over NFS and SMB with all-flash performance.

Element software

Element enables the storage administrator to consolidate workloads by guaranteeing performance and enabling a simplified and streamlined storage footprint.

NetApp HCI

NetApp HCI simplifies the management and scale of the datacenter by automating routine tasks and enabling infrastructure administrators to focus on more important functions.

Astra Trident can provision and manage storage devices for containerized applications directly against the underlying NetApp HCI storage platform.

NetApp ONTAP

NetApp ONTAP is the NetApp multiprotocol, unified storage operating system that provides advanced data management capabilities for any application.

ONTAP systems have all-flash, hybrid, or all-HDD configurations and offer many different deployment models, including engineered hardware (FAS and AFF), white-box (ONTAP Select), and cloud-only (Cloud Volumes ONTAP). Astra Trident supports these ONTAP deployment models.