Trident for Kubernetes

Trident integrates natively with Kubernetes and its Persistent Volume framework to seamlessly provision and manage volumes from systems running any combination of NetApp’s ONTAP (AFF/FAS/Select/Cloud), Element (HCI/SolidFire), or SANtricity (E/EF-Series) data management platforms.

Relative to other Kubernetes provisioners, Trident is novel in the following respects:

1. It is the first out-of-tree, out-of-process storage provisioner that works by watching events at the Kubernetes API Server, affording it levels of visibility and flexibility that cannot otherwise be achieved.

2. It is capable of orchestrating across multiple platforms at the same time through a unified interface. Rather than tying a request for a persistent volume to a particular system, Trident selects one from those it manages based on the higher-level qualities that the user is looking for in their volume.

Trident tightly integrates with Kubernetes to allow your users to request and manage persistent volumes using native Kubernetes interfaces and constructs. It’s designed to work in such a way that your users can take advantage of the underlying capabilities of your storage infrastructure without having to know anything about it.

It automates the rest for you, the Kubernetes administrator, based on policies that you define.

A great way to get a feel for what we’re trying to accomplish is to see Trident in action from the perspective of an end user. This is a great demonstration of Kubernetes volume consumption when Trident is in the mix, through the lens of Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, which is itself built on Kubernetes. All of the concepts in the video apply to any Kubernetes deployment.

While some details about Trident and NetApp storage systems are shown in the video to help you see what’s going on behind-the-scenes, in standard deployments Trident and the rest of the infrastructure is completely hidden from the user.

Let’s lift up the covers a bit to better understand Trident and what it is doing. This introductory video provides a great way to do just that.

Contents:

• Deploying
  • Before you begin
  • 1: Qualify your Kubernetes cluster
  • 2: Download & extract the installer
  • 3: Configure the installer
  • 4: Install Trident
  • 5: Add your first backend
  • 6: Add your first storage class
  • 7: Provision your first volume
  • 8: Mount the volume in a pod
• Common tasks
  • Managing Trident
  • Worker preparation
  • Backend configuration
  • Managing backends
  • Managing storage classes
• Production considerations
  • etcd
• Concepts
  • Kubernetes and Trident objects
  • How does provisioning work?
• Known issues
• Troubleshooting
• CSI Trident for Kubernetes
  • CSI overview
  • CSI Trident