The digital landscape never stops evolving, which means businesses are always seeking flexible, scalable, and efficient ways to manage their applications across diverse environments.
Container orchestration with Kubernetes has been a major part of that evolution. And now NetApp® and AWS have a new way to make that happen.
NetApp is thrilled to announce our collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a launch partner for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Hybrid Nodes (EKS-H). EKS-H is a groundbreaking new feature that extends the power of Amazon EKS beyond the cloud. It enables customers to integrate on-premises and edge infrastructure as nodes in their EKS clusters, while still leveraging AWS-managed Kubernetes control planes in the AWS Cloud.
With EKS Hybrid Nodes, organizations can seamlessly unify their data centers, edge locations, and AWS resources, significantly reducing the operational effort required to run hybrid Kubernetes applications. This approach delivers a truly hybrid Kubernetes environment, offering a consistent experience across the entire infrastructure landscape. Customers can use the same EKS clusters, features, and tools they're accustomed to in the AWS Cloud, now spanning both their on-premises and cloud environments. This unified experience supports a wide range of workloads, including high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), rendering, exploratory data analysis (EDA), extract-transform-and-load operations (ETL), enterprise applications, and many more.
This hybrid model offers unparalleled flexibility, enabling businesses to:
- Simplify cloud bursting: Easily extend on-premises applications to the cloud to handle peak workloads without over provisioning local resources, enabling dynamic scalability and cost optimization.
- Enhance agility: Deploy and manage applications consistently across all environments, reducing complexity and speeding up time to market.
- Optimize resources: Balance workloads between environments located on premises and on AWS to optimize both cost-efficiency and performance.
- Strengthen disaster recovery: Leverage multiple environments to enhance resilience for business continuity.
- Streamline operations: Benefit from AWS-managed Kubernetes control planes and unified management, using the same EKS clusters, features, and tools across your entire infrastructure while minimizing operational complexity.
NetApp's comprehensive solutions for Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes
At NetApp, we want to empower our customers to maximize the benefits of EKS-H. We offer a full range of cutting-edge technologies that can enhance performance, security, and manageability across hybrid environments.
Let’s see how these services each support EKS-H deployments.
Seamless storage provisioning and advanced data management with Trident CSI
The Trident™ Container Storage Interface (CSI) provisioner enables effortless storage provisioning for both on-premises and AWS-based EKS nodes. With Trident CSI, you gain access to advanced data management features such as:
- Cloning: Rapidly create duplicate datasets for testing or development.
- Encryption: Keep sensitive data protected using encryption protocols.
- Quality of service (QoS): Manage resource allocation to keep performance consistent.
- Replication and snapshot copies: Safeguard data with efficient backup and restore capabilities.
- Tiering: Optimize storage costs by automatically moving data between storage tiers based on usage patterns.
Comprehensive data protection with Trident Protect
Trident Protect, a free add-on to Trident, offers robust backup, restore, migration, and disaster recovery solutions for EKS-based applications both on premises and in the AWS Cloud, including EKS-H. It operates at the application level, encapsulating all Kubernetes objects and data on external persistent volumes (PVs) for seamless data protection and mobility.
Zero downtime with MetroCluster technology
Using MetroCluster® technology means zero downtime for EKS-H PVs by mirroring them across two separate on-premises clusters. This solution provides synced replication between sites, delivering continual high availability and preventing any data from being lost in the event of a site failure.
Bringing Amazon S3 services on premises with ONTAP S3 and StorageGRID
ONTAP® S3 and StorageGRID® extend the robust, fast, and secure Amazon S3 services to on-premises environments. This integration allows you to leverage S3-compatible object storage within your data centers, providing:
- Scalability: Easily scale storage capacity to meet growing data demands.
- Performance: Achieve high-speed access to critical data.
- Security: Maintain strict data governance and compliance controls on premises.
Unified infrastructure with FlexPod solutions
FlexPod® offerings deliver a cohesive platform to host EKS-H clusters on premises or at the edge. FlexPod provides all the necessary components—storage, software, networking, operating systems, and compute resources—to support EKS-H everywhere it’s available, keeping performance consistent and manageable.
Global namespace PVs with FlexCache technology
Utilizing FlexCache® technology makes it possible to create global namespace PVs accessible by different AWS Regions and on-premises environments. This feature offers:
- High-speed, low-latency access: Rapidly access data across distributed locations.
- Data consistency: Maintain up-to-date data across all sites.
- Chain-of-custody maintenance: Preserve data integrity and align with compliance goals throughout data movements.
Full-stack observability with Data Infrastructure Insights
NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights (previously Cloud Insights) provides EKS-H customers with a single pane of glass for comprehensive observability and metrics collection. It spans across AWS-based and on-premises heterogeneous infrastructures, operating systems, Kubernetes clusters, and applications, offering:
- Performance monitoring: Identify and resolve issues before they impact users.
- Cost optimization: Analyze resource usage to reduce expenses.
- Security enhancements: Detect anomalous behavior and potential security threats.
Advanced storage workload security and autonomous ransomware protection
NetApp solutions employ AI-driven technologies to automatically safeguard EKS-H PVs against:
- Ransomware attacks: Detect and block malicious activities in real time.
- Internal theft and corruption: Monitor for unauthorized access and alterations.
- Data poisoning attacks: Protect the integrity of your datasets.
- Intellectual property infiltrations: Secure sensitive information from internal and external threats.
Edge and data center data management with ONTAP Select
ONTAP Select is the premier software-defined storage solution from NetApp. It allows customers to utilize their own hardware to host data at the edge and in data centers. It offers the full suite of advanced NetApp data management features, security protocols, and seamless integration with EKS-H.
Cost-efficient storage with FabricPool
With ONTAP FabricPool, customers can transparently tier or archive their on-premises PV data to lower-cost storage tiers on AWS or to economical object or S3 storage on premises. This feature optimizes storage expenditure without compromising data availability or performance.
Centralized management with the BlueXP control plane
NetApp BlueXP™ provides a unified control plane for automating, integrating, managing, and reporting across NetApp services. It simplifies operations for Amazon EKS and EKS-H clusters both on premises and on AWS, enhancing efficiency and reducing administrative overhead.
Data compliance and forensics with BlueXP classification
BlueXP classification helps keep personally identifiable information (PII) and other compliance-sensitive data within designated environments. That can help prevent accidental data movement between on-premises and EKS-H environments to support:
- Data forensics: Facilitate investigations following security incidents.
- Litigation support: Assist in regulatory data requests and evidence gathering.
- Policy enforcement: Automatically apply data handling policies across all environments.
Enhanced observability with NetApp Harvest
NetApp Harvest brings in-depth observability to ONTAP-based and StorageGRID clusters, monitoring your EKS and EKS-H deployments. It collects performance, capacity, and hardware metrics, transforming them and routing to your choice of time-series databases. With included Grafana dashboards, you gain:
- Data center insights: Access critical information for decision-making.
- Custom metrics collection: Easily expand monitoring capabilities with template files.
- Proactive management: Identify and address issues proactively to maintain optimal operations.
Looking ahead
Our collaboration with AWS on EKS Hybrid Nodes represents a shared commitment to flexible, efficient, and secure workload management. This innovative capability simplifies Kubernetes operations across diverse environments, providing a unified management experience. NetApp is excited to offer complementary tools and expertise, enabling customers to maximize the potential of EKS Hybrid Nodes and transform their application ecosystems. Together, we're paving the way for more seamless, efficient Kubernetes management across cloud and on-premises environments.
We look forward to collaborating with organizations worldwide to architect Amazon EKS solutions that can grow businesses, drive innovation, and help transform the technological landscape.
Learn more in the Amazon EKS managed Kubernetes page.
