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August 29, 2022
Topics: Astra Advanced4 minute readKubernetes Protection
We’re excited to announce the latest update of the NetApp® Astra™ Control data management solution. This update adds Kubernetes disaster recovery for hybrid multicloud environments with support for the NetApp SnapMirror® replication-based business continuity technology feature of NetApp ONTAP®. This feature enhances Kubernetes application disaster recovery and provides an application-consistent backup and restore framework. The new release also adds support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Additionally, Astra Control Service can now be purchased directly through the Azure marketplace.
Astra Control is an application-aware data management solution that protects, recovers, and moves data-rich Kubernetes workloads in public clouds and on premises. It enables data protection, disaster recovery, and mobility for Kubernetes workloads by leveraging NetApp’s industry-leading data management technology for Snapshot™ copies, backups, replication, and cloning.
Astra Control has two variants—Astra Control Service and Astra Control Center. Astra Control Service is a fully managed service (SaaS offering) operated by NetApp, and Astra Control Center offers the same data services functionality packaged as a self-managed software suite.
Here’s a summary of the new Astra Control functionality available in this release.
Application business continuity via SnapMirror
With this release, Astra Control extends its disaster recovery capability by integrating SnapMirror technologies to deliver a low-RPO and low-RTO business continuity solution to Kubernetes applications. You can now build seamless failover and failback of Kubernetes applications across hybrid clouds or multiple data centers while maintaining strict SLAs. Astra Control leverages SnapMirror for fast and efficient data replication to provide an application-aware business continuity solution that requires limited admin intervention.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service integration
With this update of Astra Control Service, you can protect, clone, and move applications hosted on Amazon EKS clusters with support for both Amazon Elastic Block Storage and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as backing storage to meet a wide range of cost, availability, and performance requirements. Applications can also be restored, migrated, and cloned between Amazon EKS clusters, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters.
Enhanced application-consistent backup and restore framework
The December 2021 release added support for execution hooks to provide application-consistent Snapshot copies. This release extends execution hooks framework for application-consistent backup and restore actions. Additionally, the execution hook framework offers improved usability by displaying regular expression (regex) matches in the user interface and enables hook source scripts to be used across several applications.
Purchase Astra Control Service through the Azure Marketplace
Astra Control Service is now available for you to purchase through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace with a “pay as you go” subscription with low pricing of just $0.005 per managed application per minute. Astra is also available through the Azure Marketplace for private term-based subscriptions. For full details, ask your sales team, or send email to ng-AstraSales@netapp.com.
Open-source project Verda provides custom actions to protect cloud-native apps
A new open-source project called Verda offers a repository of custom actions, including execution hooks, and describes other techniques to protect popular containerized cloud-native applications like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Kafka. This release moved a set of execution hooks (used for taking application-consistent Snapshot copies) that was shipped in earlier releases of Astra Control to this project, added new ones, and specified other custom actions necessary to protect these apps with Astra Control. The project will be expanded to protect other apps based on customer demand. Customers and users will also be able to contribute to this project. The project will curate, test, and maintain the tooling for protecting containerized cloud-native apps to make it a trusted source for our customers.
Summary
This update of Astra Control is significant in delivering a low-RPO and low-RTO based business-continuity and disaster-recovery solution to Kubernetes applications. It enhances an application-consistent backup and restore framework; supports all three leading public clouds with the inclusion of support for applications running on Amazon EKS; and adds the ability to purchase Astra through the Azure Marketplace.
Learn more on the Astra Control product page.
Free trials are available for both Astra Control Service and Astra Control Center. Sign up to get started today.