Guests: Eric Han (LinkedIn) | Shiva Subramanyam (LinkedIn)
Company: NetApp (Twitter)

NetApp has a well-known heritage in storage and data management. It has transitioned early and successfully into the cloud, specifically with hyperscalers and cloud services.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with two NetApp executives: VP of Product Management of Cloud Eric Han and VP of Engineering (Astra & ONTAP) Shiva Subramanyam to talk about the current industry landscape and how Astra can help companies manage their Kubernetes workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• NetApp’s portfolio has expanded beyond storage and data management all the way through cloud and CloudOps. Astra brings a lot of NetApp’s existing capabilities to a new audience in Kubernetes to solve some of the challenges when it comes to data and stateful applications.
• Kubernetes started with stateless workloads and is really good at it. Innovation around stateful workloads, i.e., moving data across systems, moving data across regions, etc. is still nascent and this is the space Subramanyam is most excited about. He joins NetApp from Salesforce where he’s built sophisticated systems that manage data and manage persistence, using Kubernetes to solve complex business problems.
• In the macroeconomic situation, a company’s secondary (non-core) projects will get extra attention or extra scrutiny as this may not be the time to tackle them. For the core project, companies need something that scales, something that’s automated, that can spin up and spin down. From all the things that can be done with data, there are cost efficiencies that can be articulated.
• For companies that adopted Kubernetes, these challenges remain: 1) how to stay current when there is a new release every few months, 2) how to continue to innovate while using Kubernetes that is already in production, and 3) determining what they can truly achieve when they adopt new capabilities.
• Han thinks the fundamental basis of applications of ISVs and enterprises are all going to be based in Kubernetes. The best thing that NetApp can do for those challenges is to be out there engaging with the ecosystem, solving those problems, and helping them along the way.
• There was an era of virtualization, there has been an era of cloud, but there is always going to be an era of applications. And that’s where Kubernetes provides the orchestration benefits. From NetApp’s perspective, there’s always going to be a key component that has data, which Astra can easily handle.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.