We’re excited to announce that we have updated NetApp® AstraTM Control Service (ACS) to support Google Persistent Disk in addition to NetApp Cloud Volumes Service. These updates make it even easier to protect and move your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) workloads, backed by Google Persistent Disk, within and across clusters in the same or different Google Cloud regions. Google Persistent Disk offers high-performance, durable block storage for business-critical applications, including GKE.
NetApp Astra Control Service is a fully managed application-aware data management service that protects, recovers, and moves your data-rich GKE workloads with just a few clicks. ACS provides automatic storage provisioning, application-aware backups, disaster recovery, and mobility for your GKE workloads by using NetApp's industry-leading data management services.
With support for Google Persistent Disk as a storage provider for ACS, your business-critical GKE workloads backed by Google Persistent disks benefit from the rich storage and data management functionality offered by ACS. Additionally, since ACS already supports Cloud Volumes Service, your GKE workloads that use both Google Persistent Disk and Cloud Volumes Service are now fully protected by ACS. ACS offers data management for both existing and new GKE workloads backed by Google Persistent Disk and accessed using the Google Persistent Disk Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. GKE uses this CSI specification compliant driver to manage the lifecycle of Google Persistent Disks.
To enable data protection and mobility for your GKE workloads, you begin by providing ACS the credentials (service account) required to access your Google Cloud account. You add to ACS the GKE clusters that contain the applications you want to manage. ACS automatically discovers the eligible and available GKE clusters in your Google Cloud account. When adding a new cluster, ACS prompts you to select the storage class that you want to set as default from the built-in Google Persistent Disk and, if configured, Cloud Volumes Service classes:
"standard-rwo" is backed by standard hard disks.
"premium-rwo" uses faster SSDs to create a managed disk.
After reviewing the selection of your GKE cluster and the default storage class, you approve the addition of the cluster to Astra Control Service. Astra then allocates a native object storage bucket (from Google Cloud Storage) for its internal needs and shows the cluster as Available. You can also add your own bucket to meet your data residency, sovereignty, and governance requirements.
At this point, if applications are running on your GKE cluster, ACS discovers them automatically and allows you to manage them, including their namespaces. After a GKE cluster is added to ACS, all applications (and namespaces) that you add to the cluster are discovered automatically until you unmanage the cluster. From the list of automatically discovered applications, you select the workloads you want ACS to manage by promoting these applications to the Managed state.
The applications that ACS manages show up as Available and offer a catalog of application-aware data management functionality that you can invoke to match your applications' data management requirements, including application-aware snapshots, backups, restore, and clones.
With support for Google Persistent Disk for ACS managed apps, you can protect and move a broad set of stateful GKE workloads that require performant and durable block storage and other applications that use Google Persistent Disk. (Google Persistent Disk is a popular Kubernetes storage provider, as described in the CNCF 2020 Survey report, page 18.) Use ACS to take application-aware snapshots for local data protection and remote backups for recovering after a disaster, and to create instant-active clones for various dev and test use cases across multiple GKE clusters. All ACS functionality is exposed by using a set of well-documented APIs and a toolkit that wraps the APIs with Python bindings for popular languages, making it easier to programmatically invoke the rich set of data management functionality that ACS provides.
Sign up for a free Astra Control Service trial and get started today.