Part of the transition to DevOps that comes with cloud native application development, has been a shift in responsibility for storage, away from dedicated specialists towards developers who are increasingly responsible for provisioning the storage for the applications they build.

“People do not want storage to be a complicated task,” said Chris Merz, principal technologist at NetApp. “It is a piece of infrastructure. It should be simple, it should be scalable, it should be self healing. They should follow the same patterns as the systems that DevOps practitioners and cloud native architects are building every day.”

Before Kubernetes, building and operating container-based applications was onerous—it involved manually handling tasks like DNS management, load balancing, scaling and resource monitoring. Now the Kubernetes ecosystem handles all of that—but there needs to be a way to get the same level of automation for storage, Merz said.