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

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

AI Search for OpenSearch is generally available on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform. It brings semantic search, hybrid search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) without the complexity of managing software, infrastructure, or operational management. General availability expands on the public preview, adding support for external LLM and embedding services such as Amazon Bedrock and OpenAI for enterprise search, e-commerce, support chatbots, and observability-style use cases. Unlock new possibilities with AI search—learn more.

Introducing Kafka Client Telemetry: Centralized client metrics for Instaclustr Managed Apache Kafka®

NetApp is introducing Client Telemetry for Instaclustr for Apache Kafka®, designed to deliver broker-integrated visibility into Kafka client and application-level metrics, with telemetry export and centralized collection. Instaclustr for Apache Kafka users can gain visibility into client behavior such as connection status, request rates, error rates, and latency from the broker, simplifying monitoring and supporting a holistic view of client interactions. Compliant Kafka clients collect metrics and push them to the brokers; brokers use an OpenTelemetry Collector to forward metrics to a customer-specified destination, with Prometheus 3.0+ and Datadog supported in this initial release.

Powering low-latency analytics with ClickHouse® and Amazon FSx

Instaclustr Managed ClickHouse integrated with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is built to run analytical queries directly on file-based data that can transparently tier to lower-cost capacity, without relying on extra staging layers, ingestion pipelines, or format-specific copies to make data queryable. The integration now supports deployments where compute and storage can reside in different VPCs or AWS accounts, enabling flexible, enterprise-grade architectures with consistent storage access across network and account boundaries.

Other significant changes

Apache Cassandra®

  • Self-service iccassandra password reset — customers can now reset their iccassandra database password directly from the console via the Connection Info page, eliminating the need to raise a support ticket. The new password is displayed for 5 days before being automatically removed.
  • Released Apache Cassandra v4.1.10 into General Availability on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform, delivering a stability-focused patch release, while deprecating Apache Cassandra 4.1.9.

Apache Kafka®

ClickHouse®

OpenSearch®

  • New c7g.8xlarge node size on the AWS provider has been added to support OpenSearch clusters.
  • OpenSearch 3.5.0 released to General Availability.
  • AI Search is now available on the free trial.

PostgreSQL®

Instaclustr Managed Platform

  • The new AWS region, ap-southeast-6 (New Zealand), has been added.
  • Cluster tag management improvements — multiple enhancements to tag search, display, and validation in the console and API, including prevention of duplicate tag keys for better data consistency.

Future releases

OpenSearch®

  • We’re preparing to introduce GPU nodes for OpenSearch on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform, bringing dedicated machine learning capabilities directly into your managed clusters. With GPU nodes, vector indexing can be up to 10x faster and CPU load is reduced, freeing cluster capacity for mission-critical workloads. Additionally, GPUs offer superior cost-efficiency compared to traditional CPU-based vector indexing, driving down the total cost of ownership.

PostgreSQL®

  • We’re close to launching PostgreSQL® integrated with FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN) into GA, now including NVMe support—designed to deliver improved throughput, up to 20% observed greater throughput than we achieved with our public preview. This enhancement combines enterprise-grade PostgreSQL with FSxN’s scalable, cost-efficient storage for better cost, performance, and flexibility, while enabling ONTAP snapshots for backups, mirroring, and multi-region recovery—fast snapshot/restore and daily backups for large databases.

MCP Gateway Service

  • NetApp Instaclustr plans to release the Remote MCP Gateway Service powered by AgentGateway on the Instaclustr Managed Platform. This service will let you, in minutes, provision and configure a production-ready Model Context Protocol gateway to provide LLM access to databases, application data infrastructure services, and REST APIs.

Instaclustr Managed Platform

  • Coming soon, NetApp Instaclustr will be launching the Self-Service Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) feature for AWS, offering a fully guided onboarding experience that allows customers to connect their AWS accounts and begin deploying managed clusters directly from the console — making it faster and easier for customers who prefer to run clusters in their own cloud environments.
    Cluster DNS will soon be available for Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka clusters on AWS allowing you to connect to your applications using simple, stable hostnames instead of long lists of IP addresses. When node IPs change due to scaling, replacement, or maintenance there is no longer a need to update client configuration.

Did you know?

  • Need an end-to-end pattern for streaming analytics on AWS? The same-day three-part series How to build a streaming analytics pipeline with Terraform and Instaclustr, Part 1: Setting up your first Kafka® cluster, Part 2: Designing the complete data pipeline, and Part 3: Integrating with AWS VPC show how to stand up Kafka with Terraform, connect ClickHouse and Kafka Connect into a real pipeline, and finish with VPC integration for secure networking. Together the posts bridge provisioning, data flow design, and cloud networking without skipping the glue work that usually stalls proof-of-concepts.
  • Apache Kafka 4.1.0 introduces the Streams Rebalance Protocol in early access for Kafka Streams: a broker-driven assignment model that eliminates client-side coordination, reduces “stop-the-world” rebalance pauses, and delivers smoother task assignment as Streams applications scale horizontally. For a walkthrough of when you need it, how to enable it, and what to expect, see What’s new in Kafka® 4.1.0? Introducing the new Streams Rebalance Protocol.
  • OpenSearch 3.6 release bundles a wide set of upstream changes: ML Commons AI agent improvement such as token usage tracking, k-NN vector search performance improvements including Lucene Better Binary Quantization, Dashboards updates across AI chat and Explore, and OpenSearch APM for observability. For a single walkthrough of those themes, see OpenSearch version 3.6 release: smart agents and fast search. We’re currently testing OpenSearch 3.6 for compatibility and security purposes. Keep an eye on our release blog for more information about when this exciting new release will be available on the managed platform.

If you have any questions or need further assistance with these enhancements to the Instaclustr Managed Platform, please contact us.

SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT: Any unreleased services or features referenced in this blog are not currently available and may not be made generally available on time or at all, as may be determined in NetApp’s sole discretion. Any such referenced services or features do not represent promises to deliver, commitments, or obligations of NetApp and may not be incorporated into any contract. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services and features that are currently generally available.