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 indicators—now available in the NetApp Instaclustr console. The new AI Cluster Health page simplifies cluster monitoring, making it easy to understand your cluster’s state at a glance without requiring deep technical expertise. This AI-driven analysis reviews recent metrics, highlights key indicators, explains their impact, and assigns an easy traffic-light health score for a quick status overview.

NetApp introduces Apache Kafka® Tiered Storage support on GCP in public preview

Tiered Storage is now available in public review for Instaclustr for Apache Kafka on Google Cloud Platform. This feature enables customers to optimize storage costs and improve scalability by offloading older Kafka log segments from local disk to Google Cloud Storage (GCS), while keeping active data local for fast access. Kafka clients continue to consume data seamlessly with no changes required, allowing teams to reduce infrastructure costs, simplify cluster scaling, and extend retention periods for analytics or compliance.

Other significant changes Apache Cassandra®

• Released Apache Cassandra 4.0.19 and 5.0.6 into general availability on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform, giving customers access to the latest stability, performance, and security improvements.
• Multi–data center Apache Cassandra clusters can now be provisioned across public and private networks via the Instaclustr Console, API, and Terraform provider, enabling customers to provision multi-DC clusters from day one.
• Single CA feature is now available for Apache Cassandra clusters. See Single CA for more details.
• GCP n4 machine types are now supported for Apache Cassandra in the available regions.

Apache Kafka®

• Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect 4.1.1 are now generally available.
• Added Client Metrics and Observability feature support for Kafka in private preview.
• Single CA feature is now available for Apache Kafka clusters. See Single CA for more details.

ClickHouse®

• ClickHouse 25.8.11 has been added to our managed platform in General Availability.
• Enabled ClickHouse system.session_log table that plays a key role in tracking session lifecycle and auditing user activities for enhanced session monitoring. This helps you with troubleshooting client-side connectivity issues and provides insights into failed connections.

OpenSearch®

• OpenSearch 2.19.4 and 3.3.2 have been released to general availability.
• Added support for the OpenSearch Assistant feature in OpenSearch Dashboards for clusters with Dashboards and AI Search enabled.

PostgreSQL®

• PostgreSQL version 18.1 has now been released to general availability, alongside PostgreSQL version 17.7.
• PgBouncer version 1.25.0 has now been released to general availability.

Instaclustr Managed Platform

• Added self-service Tags Management feature—allowing users to add, edit, or delete tags for their clusters directly through the Instaclustr console, APIs, or Terraform provider for RIYOA deployments
• Added new region Germany West Central for Azure

Future releases Apache Kafka®

• Following the private preview release, Kafka’s Client Telemetry feature is progressing toward general availability soon. Read more here.

ClickHouse®

• We plan to extend the current ClickHouse integration with FSxN data sources by adding support for deployments across different VPCs, enabling broader enterprise lakehouse architectures.
• Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake integration are planned to soon be available for ClickHouse on the NetApp Instaclustr Platform, giving you a practical way to run analytics on open table formats while keeping control of your existing data platforms.
• We plan to soon introduce fully integrated AWS PrivateLink as a ClickHouse Add-On for secure and seamless connectivity with ClickHouse.

PostgreSQL®

• We’re aiming to launch PostgreSQL integrated with FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN) along with NVMe support into general availability soon. This enhancement is designed to combine enterprise-grade PostgreSQL with FSxN’s scalable, cost-efficient storage, enabling customers to optimize infrastructure costs while improving performance and flexibility. NVMe support is designed to deliver up to 20% greater throughput vs NFS.

OpenSearch®

• An AI Search plugin for OpenSearch is being released to GA (currently in public preview) to enhance search experiences using AI‑powered techniques such as semantic, hybrid, and conversational search, enabling more relevant, context‑aware results and unlocking new use cases including retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) and AI‑driven chatbots.

Instaclustr Managed Platform

• Following the public preview release, Zero Inbound Access is progressing to General Availability, designed to deliver the most secure management connectivity by eliminating inbound internet exposure and removing the need for any routable public IP addresses, including bastion or gateway instances.

Did you know?

• Explore how to freeze your streaming data for long-term analytical queries in the future with our two-part blog series: Freezing streaming data into Apache Iceberg—Part 1: Using Apache Kafka®Connect Iceberg Sink Connector introduces Apache Iceberg and demonstrates streaming Kafka data using the Apache Kafka Connect Iceberg Sink Connector and Freezing streaming data into Apache Iceberg—Part 2: Using Iceberg Topics examines the experimental approach of using Kafka Tiered Storage and Iceberg Topics, where non‑active Kafka segments are copied to remote storage while remaining transparently readable by Kafka clients.
• Modern search applications go beyond simple keyword matching, requiring a deep understanding of user intent and context to deliver relevant, meaningful results. From keywords to concepts: How OpenSearch® AI search outperforms traditional search explores how semantic and hybrid search methods in OpenSearch AI search compare to traditional keyword search, and how you can use these capabilities for more relevant results.
• Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are booming, and they’ve put a spotlight on a crucial technology: vector search. Many applications today demand high throughput, low latency, and constant availability for retrieving information. Slow vector search can become a significant bottleneck, delaying responses and degrading the user experience. Our two-part series blogs Vector search benchmarking: Setting up embeddings, insertion, and retrieval with PostgreSQL® and Vector search benchmarking: Embeddings, insertion, and searching documents with ClickHouse® and Apache Cassandra® explore hands-on findings from our benchmarking projects, the role of databases in vector search, how to set up vector search for embeddings, insertion, and retrieval, and practical strategies for building faster, more efficient semantic search systems.

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. 

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