Despite the years of buzz around data migration as necessity in a digitally transforming market, hybrid cloud has emerged as the more agile, customizable option for businesses with various data storage needs.

With the benefit of internal experience adopting cloud as a legacy enterprise at NetApp Inc., Anthony Lye (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of cloud at NetApp Inc., and Matt Baldwin (pictured, left), director of cloud-native software engineering at NetApp, are working with Kubernetes and Amazon Web Services Inc. to leverage hybrid insights, enable freedom of choice, and support data orchestration in every environment.

Lye and Baldwin spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed enterprise trends in hybrid cloud and how NetApp is working to provide a foundation for customers at every level of cloud to transform. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Walls: What do you see as the hot topic at re:Invent this week?

Lye: Andy [Jassy] continues to support hybrid cloud as a reality, and those architectures for us present enormous opportunity. Tons of innovation, some on Kubernetes.

Baldwin: We’re part of the Amazon Marketplace as of this week for our NetApp Kubernetes service, so my big takeaway is that container marketplace.

Warren: Tell us about about Kubernetes and the way that you’re using it with NetApp.

Baldwin: We just finished integrating the old StackPoint technology that was acquired into the NetApp technology. Now we allow you to stand up a Kubernetes cluster at Trident, which also exposes Amazon Cloud Volumes Service, and then consume those disks as if you’re consuming any other type of disk for all of your stateful workload. You hear a lot of stateless only, and with NetApp combined with Kubernetes, we’ve actually solved stateful workload problems.

Lye: Cloud Volumes Service, unlike other storage services on the clouds, is truly delivered as a service. You just provision an amount of a file system, provision throughput, and NetApp [runs] it for you. When you combine a high-performing storage service with the container-based service, it enables developers to do what they should be doing and frees them from managing, monitoring, maintaining [and] upgrading. NetApp provides these services to customers in the same way that Verizon provides dial-tone.

Baldwin: The operational environment should be managing itself, and then all you’re worrying about as a developer is how [to] ship code into this environment [and] manage that application once inside. NetApp Kubernetes services [is] allowing you to not only do lifecycle management of the infrastructure, but of the apps themselves that you’ve deployed into the environment.

Warren: For customers who are looking at transforming and embracing hybrid cloud, what does the journey look like? How do you help them make that transition?

Lye: We have a solution called Cloud Volumes ONTAP that allows you to run ONTAP in the cloud just as you run it on-premise and build the data relationship. For people who [want] to move to the big primary, that’s where we position Cloud Volumes Service, SAP workloads, Oracle Database workloads. Combining our high-performance storage services with Kubernetes for orchestration of infrastructure and application was a natural for us. And we introduced about a month ago a new product called Cloud Insights, which is cloud analytics performance monitoring and charge-back platform.

NetApp decided to embrace the cloud about four and a half years ago and ported its flagship operating system from its engineered systems into AWS. Most people at the time predicted the end of NetApp and the end of on-premise, and anybody doing anything in storage would be dead. [Now] we’re one AWS’ biggest partners, [and] thousands of customers rely on NetApp, whether they’re an existing NetApp customer on [premise] or not.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS reInvent. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE