The Dream of Zero-Data Gravity is Closer Than You Think!

You know how everything seems faded in comparison when you fall in love? I know it sounds mushy, but that is the only way I can describe the feeling when I started playing with Stackpoint.io and met the founder, Matt Baldwin, for the first time, hearing how he talked about his team of rock stars. I instantly felt like I knew all of them. Great platform, full of awesome potential and a vision that really aligned with ours. It was funny when we (Eiki, our Data Fabric Wizard, Matt and I) finally sat down and started talking, us being corporate noobs and pretty much newly acquired.

Matt, being his upfront and honest self, immediately asked me “Jonsi … but why NetApp?” Those who know me can guess what happened next. I, of course, went off on a massive monologue about how with NetApp we were in this unique position to actually address and solve one of the biggest blockers, to achieve what we keep referring to as the true cloud concept, where workloads can be moved to the perfect home based on its need, function or cost. We agreed that Kubernetes was the platform that was already helping us on that journey, but what about data gravity, Multi-cloud and bridging the gap between on-premise and the clouds?

We talked about how Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes Service would be the foundation for solving the data gravity part for Kubernetes with Trident and taking advantages of all the data management capabilities of ONTAP. We talked about how we had built everything in regard to Azure NetApp Files, Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform and Cloud Volumes for AWS on Kubernetes, everything packaged in our own managed Helm-charts taking full advantage of load-based autoscaling for everything from our stateless replica sets (e.g API server) to our stateful replica sets (e.g databases).

We even talked about how we had already tried spinning up our master helm chart using Stackpoint.