Stateful Workloads in Kubernetes with Trident — The NetApp Way

NetApp sponsored this podcast.

A question that may come to mind for those managing enterprise workloads is: What is Trident? This is the topic that George Tehrani, NetApp’s director of product management for the open ecosystem answered on this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams.

“By and large, any workload of importance to the enterprise needs some sort of persistence. So what Trident is, is an open source storage orchestrator that NetApp developed and continues to maintain. It greatly simplifies the creation, management, and consumption of persistent storage for enterprise workloads in Kubernetes, as well as the other major distributions of Kubernetes such as OpenShift.”

How NetApp’s Trident Helps Kubernetes with Stateful Workloads

“The most common way of viewing Trident is to think of it as the integration between various storage platforms that NetApp offers as well as the container orchestrators,” Tehrani said, adding that Trident is written in Go, the “Language of Kubernetes.” Tehrani then went on to add that as a control object, Trident isn’t in the data path, so it does not negatively impact the performance of one’s storage ecosystem.

Tehrani reiterated that the premise behind Trident was to simplify. When setting up Trident on the back end, there are a variety of platforms developers can choose from. “Simplification means one piece of infrastructure software that understands how to talk to ONTAP, knows how to talk to Element, Santricity, and of course, NetApp cloud volume services,” he said.

Tehrani later noted that Trident was the first external storage provision engine for Kubernetes. NetApp’s experience, “brings a very rich storage heritage to this space,” said Tehrani, adding that, “The differentiators are part technology, and the expertise that we bring, and it’s part really making the technology customer friendly, and making it easy to consume and easy to adopt.”

In this Edition:

1:11: What is Trident?
1:12: What sets Trident apart: The process for actual deployment.
15:07: When configuring Trident on the back end, developers have a choice of different platforms.
20:15: Trident architecture.
28:47: How Trident is represented in communities such as Kubernetes, CSI, Docker Enterprise, CNCF, and Red Hat OpenShift
33:25: Where Trident is headed.

Feature image by enriquelopezgarre from Pixabay.