What is the role that the data plane plays in a Kubernetes ecosystem? This was the theme for our latest (virtual) pancake breakfast and panel discussion, sponsored by DataStax, the keeper of the open source Cassandra database.

Last month, Datastax released a Kubernetes operator, so that the NoSQL database can be more easily installed, managed, and updated in Kubernetes container-based infrastructure.

The Panelists for this discussion:

Kathryn Erickson, DataStax senior director of partnerships.

Janakiram MSV, principal analyst of Janakiram & Associates.

Aaron Ploetz, Target NoSQL lead engineer.

Sam Ramji, DataStax chief strategy officer.

Alex Williams, publisher for The New Stack served as moderator for this panel, with the help of TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

in 2015, Ramji worked at Google and oversaw the business development around its then-newly open source project, Kubernetes, which was based on its internal container orchestrator, the Borg. The Borg provides Google a single control pane for dynamically managing all its many containerized workloads, and its scale-out database, Spanner, offered the same for the data plane.

“The marriage of those two things made compute and data so universally addressable so easy to access that you could do just about anything that you could imagine,” Ramji explained.