NetApp releases Public Preview of Zero Inbound Access on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform
July 17, 2025 | By Jordan Braiuka
NetApp announces the Public Preview release of Zero Inbound Access for new clusters on the NetApp Instaclustr Platform. Zero Inbound Access clusters provide our most secure management connectivity option, removing the requirement to expose any components directly to the internet.
As security and compliance continue to be important issues in all customer deployments, this capability is designed to significantly reduces the attack surface of your managed clusters. Unlike Private Network clusters, or Public Network clusters, Zero Inbound Access eliminates the requirement for any routable public IP addresses in the customer deployment—including the bastion or gateway instance.
With Zero Inbound Access, NetApp Instaclustr still maintains exclusive security and management responsibility for all managed applications and is able to achieve access to the instances using a SSH reverse tunnel. This system architecture effectively has your gateway instance “phone home” back to the Instaclustr management system to establish a persistent connection. Zero Inbound access complements the complete range of NetApp Instaclustr security features
“Zero Inbound Access adds to Instaclustr’s ongoing commitment to providing the most secure choice for running open source software in the cloud. We continue to evolve our security features to keep up with an ever-changing security landscape”—Paul Aubrey, Director of Product Management at NetApp Instaclustr.
Zero Inbound Access is available for use with Run In Your Own Account (RIYOA) provisioning on all applications on the NetApp Instaclustr managed platform, available on all cloud providers and available on-premises. Like Private Network Clusters, Zero Inbound Access gateways are an enterprise feature, and thus requires Enterprise Pricing (a 20% premium). If you are already using any enterprise feature on your cluster, such as private network clusters, there is no pricing impact.
Zero Inbound Access is being released as a Public Preview release with SLA restrictions applied. Zero Inbound Access is still under development but available to customers for early use and may have substantial changes before it enters General Availability. While it is enabled for customer usage, it is required that you contact Instaclustr Support and perform your own testing before using in production. Private Network Clusters cannot be migrated to Zero Inbound Access while in Public Preview. Check out our lifecycle policy for more information.
We are already well underway with our General Availability release of Zero Inbound Access on the NetApp Instaclustr platform, which brings additional exciting capabilities including migration of existing Private Network clusters to Zero Inbound Access, PCI compliance, and improve operational tasks including patching and cloud provider replaces. Additionally, the General Availability release will be suitable for Production SLA tier clusters.
If you’re ready to transform the way your organization protects its assets, consider how Zero Inbound Access could fit into your security strategy. The Public Preview release of Zero Inbound Access is available for new clusters now on the NetApp Instaclustr console, or via the cluster management API and Terraform provider. To get started with creating your first Zero Inbound Access cluster see our support documentation. For more information about the Zero Inbound Access feature don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.