Why NetApp Wants You to Have One Safe Foundation for Any Infrastructure  – InApps 2022

This podcast was sponsored by NetApp.

One of the main components of the mantra “all companies are software companies” is organizations’ DevOps must deploy and update applications rapidly and at scale. The supporting infrastructure hosting the production pipelines and deployments must also be both safe and sound, regardless of whether it is on the cloud, on-premises or — more likely — a mix of both.

Why NetApp Wants You to Have One Safe Foundation for Any Infrastructure

Also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, PlayerFM, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn

Subscribe on Simplecast | Fireside.fm | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Spotify | TuneIn

The main theme of this episode InApps Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of InApps, was how NetApp offers a foundation for DevOps deployments and data management across cloud native and on-premises infrastructures. NetApp’s Diane Patton, hybrid cloud services (NetApp Cloud Services on HCI)  and Robert Esker, product management and strategy, discussed, among other things, how NetApp’s HCI can serve as the underlying foundation for a number infrastructures.

“We provide this common set of tools, so no matter where the developer wants to deploy their application, they can use that exact same toolset and deploy it either on-prem or deploy in any of the major cloud providers as well.,” Patton said.

The concept of HCI — or “hyper-converged infrastructure” should also be synonymous with “full stack or VMware made easy” for the “IT generalist who just needs to get something done,” Esker said.

“Maybe you have impressive technical chops or depth in certain things but you just want to get something done so you know the easy button has value. We do allow you to scale things like compute, storage and network independently of each other that differs a little bit from the classic definition of HCI,” Esker said. “But more generally applicable here is the fact that we’re trying to deliver you a capability that can function as your on-prem full-stack private cloud made easy, but moreover, to provide you tools in the form of two universal control planes that allow you to manage it as a deployable region vis-a-vis the public cloud.”

For DevOps developers for example who are “principally worried about like the value of the application logic and the cool and interesting things it does,” infrastructure is obviously a key concern. However, the value of infrastructure is largely about reliability and whether it can scale as needed.  However, ” by using that HCI, and its corresponding universal control planes, you can deploy your code… across all the recognizable public clouds and various on-prem contexts, as delivered by an API,” Esker said. “So, for a practitioner of DevOps, this is infrastructure as code, but its infrastructure code abstracted once more in that you right against this, these universal control planes.”You have a common way to deal with it all.

Kubernetes platforms, as they have have become the de facto standard for container orchestration, whether for on-premises or cloud deployments, also require a viable HCI, of course. In other words, Kubernetes is a big part of what NetApp offers.

“We provide capabilities around Kubernetes unique and interesting capabilities, but we’re not creating a proprietary downstream distribution. So the fact that Kubernetes is ubiquitous means that the code that you write means you must assume a Kubernetes context is portable to any scenario of Kubernetes,” Esker said. “And that same code, for the most part will be portable to any other scenario of standard upstream on modified vanilla Kubernetes.”

In this Edition:

1:49: Defining HCI
7:46: The need for two control planes
11:10: What makes HCI so crucial to DevOps?
15:10: How HCI eliminates walled gardens and allows for overall transparency
19:01: Can you tell us a bit about how these services work together in NetApp HCI?
23:52: What makes NetApp’s Kubernetes service unique on HCI?

Feature image via Pixabay.