How to build a streaming analytics pipeline with Terraform and Instaclustr—Part 1: Setting up your first Kafka® cluster

Why this series exists Every year, teams spend countless hours clicking through cloud consoles, manually provisioning infrastructure, and hoping they remember the exact configuration when it’s time to rebuild. Then something breaks at 2 a.m. and nobody remembers which checkbox was checked six months ago. There’s a better way. This series walks you through building...

Instaclustr product update: March 2026

Here’s a roundup of the latest features and updates that we’ve recently released. If you have any particular feature requests or enhancement ideas that you would like to see, please get in touch with us. Major announcements Introducing AI Cluster Health: Smarter monitoring made simple Turn complex metrics into clear, actionable insights with AI-powered health...

AI Search for OpenSearch is now generally available on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform

Today, NetApp announces the general availability of AI Search for OpenSearch on the Instaclustr Managed Platform, giving you a simpler way to build intelligent, context‑aware search experiences on fully managed, open source infrastructure. AI Search brings machine learning–powered capabilities—such as semantic search, hybrid search, and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG)—directly into OpenSearch, without the complexity of managing...

Migrating Ansible AWX: From Docker to a Kubernetes framework

NetApp recently started using Kubernetes with our fleet automation tooling on the NetApp Instaclustr Platform. It took us a few attempts to get the right setup for our purposes. This blog is about how we started, what didn’t work for us, and how we fixed it. The choice to introduce Kubernetes into our architecture was...

Visual Guide to Apache Kafka Diskless Topics & Cloud Costs

A visual guide to Apache Kafka® Diskless Topics: Finding Zen in the cloud  I’ve been tracking the progress of Apache Kafka “Diskless Topics” for a while now. It’s a topic that sparks curiosity—mostly because the name itself sounds like an oxymoron. How can a topic be diskless? Where does the data go?  With the recent...

Apache Cassandra® 5.0: Improving performance with Unified Compaction Strategy

Introduction Unified Compaction Strategy (UCS), introduced in Apache Cassandra 5.0, is a versatile compaction framework that not only unifies the benefits of Size-Tiered (STCS) and Leveled (LCS) Compaction Strategies, but also introduces new capabilities like shard parallelism, density-aware SSTable organization, and safer incremental compaction, all of which deliver more predictable performance at scale. By utilizing...

Under the hood: Engineering faster ClickHouse® performance 

Speed matters in data analytics. When you are processing billions of rows, even small performance improvements compound into massive time and cost savings. For ClickHouse 25.10, I contributed three patches that push the boundaries of query performance and reliability—particularly for text search and data ingestion operations that are ubiquitous in modern data workloads.  Merged contributions ...

IBM, Confluent Acquisition: What it means for your data strategy