NetApp has bought StackPointCloud, a Kubernetes-as-a-Service provider, gaining instant Kubernetes creds and enhancing its multi-cloud capabilities.
StackPoint was founded in 2014 and is based in Seattle. It developed a control plane for the Kubernetes container orchestration facility and lets users deploy a Kubernetes cluster on the major public clouds – AWS, Azure, and GCP as well as two big hosting providers, Digital Ocean and Packet. It includes persistent volume support.
StackPointCloud’s co-founder and CEO Matt Baldwin and other employees, about a dozen in total, will join NetApp. The financial terms of the deal were undisclosed but it’s hardly likely to be material to NetApp.
NetApp gains a Kubernetes-as-a-service platform that directly supports the application orchestration capabilities of its Data Fabric, and “will integrate with NetApp Cloud Volumes and Trident, enabling multi-cloud application orchestration with persistent storage for stateful applications that use file-based protocols.”
This will “dramatically increase NetApp’s presence with the Kubernetes and Istio open source DevOps communities.”
In a blog post discussing the acquisition, NetApp’s Anthony Lye, NetApp’s cloud business unit SVP, said: “The challenge in today’s modern cloud environments is not the speed to build but the speed and cost of DEPLOYING.”
“When building new things on the public clouds, it’s about microservices. When deploying on clouds, it’s a Kubernetes thing. Kubernetes is the clear winner for cloud deployment of microservices … Releasing on all the clouds is a major hassle and huge time sync for developers.”
He says StackPoint is “a SaaS-based platform for deploying, managing and upgrading Kubernetes clusters on the public clouds. One stop shop for the whole deployment, management and upgrade processes, delivered as a service! … It’s pure Kubernetes, deploys on the clouds, has GitHub integration, has all the networking figured out, supports A/B testing, canary and blue-green needs.”
Stackpoint.io is now the NetApp Kubernetes Service (NKS). It is described as a Kubernetes platform for multi-cloud deployments and a complete cloud-based stack for Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, and NetApp HCI. Note that last item: HCI. It means NetApp’s HCI is a deployment target for NKS. B&F
