NetApp IT Perspective: Using NetApp Trident to Automatically Provision Storage OpenShift Application Workloads
David Fox
Speed is mandatory in application development today. Inside NetApp IT, we have built a cloud-based, automated, self-service platform called CloudOne, which lets us rapidly deliver infrastructure to help shorten application development cycles. It offers the push-button deployment of an entire application development environment that includes the application code, a database, components, network interfaces, and a storage environment.
Our developers and users can visit the CloudOne Self-Service Portal to select DevOps service, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), container as a service (CaaS), or database as a service (DBaaS). Our public platform as a service (PaaS) marketplace is under development and will be released in a few months.
Role of Trident
CloudOne uses OpenShift as the orchestrator of the technology stack. OpenShift automatically provisions the requested application stack with everything needed in containers. This architecture enables the data to persist when the container stops.To translate the commands from OpenShift to the storage cluster, we used NetApp® Trident, an open-source, Kubernetes storage orchestrator available on GitHub. Trident can simultaneously talk to and provision NetApp ONTAP® or NetApp SolidFire®storage according to the application requirements. In our case, Trident uses ONTAP for NAS and SolidFire for block storage. The entire process is transparent to the user.
With CloudOne, Trident is the owner and administrator of storage. OpenShift creates a ticket for a storage volume, prompting Trident to talk to the NetApp Cloud Volumes Service, ONTAP, or SolidFire cluster, and then automatically configure, export, and mount the requested volume. In a traditional environment, this manual process took days or weeks of working with various teams to set up network configuration, create the necessary virtual machines, provision the storage resources, and install and configure the application stack. With human interaction engineered out of the process, it takes seconds.
Automation is changing IT roles. As storage management is pushed higher into the application stack, IT business owners and engineers will need to become fluent in managing the entire application stack. The role of the storage team is shifting toward infrastructure as code. This trend is just one departure from the traditional ways of doing things in IT.
David Fox
David Fox is a Senior UNIX Systems Engineer in NetApp IT. He is responsible for managing the IT UNIX environment, including implementing IT automation using Ansible, maintaining the use of Docker in the production environment, and leveraging OpenStack. He previously worked as a systems administrator and infrastructure engineer at IBM.
