At Google Cloud Next 2025, Rakuten Symphony and Nirmata announced successful testing and certification for the Nirmata Kyverno OSS policy engine on the Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform.
The result of this collaboration is a powerful combination of Rakuten Cloud's robust cloud-native platform and Nirmata's leading policy-as-code expertise to provide enhanced security, compliance, and operational efficiency for Kubernetes environments. Thanks to this successful testing, Rakuten Cloud customers can confidently deploy and manage stateful applications with automated governance and streamlined workflows.
As a part of this announcement, Ritesh Patel, co-founder and VP of Products at Nirmata, took the stage during one of our partner booth sessions to discuss how the products work together in a cloud-native storage application.
The growth in cloud-native applications is increasing demand for stateful storage solutions such as the Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage. Kyverno offers a policy-driven storage governance solution that adds automation, reliability, and scalability to our storageMake platform.
Patel discussed the shift in how modern applications manage data. In the past, storage configurations were often static and handled only during deployment. Today, with dynamic and scalable workloads that are deployed on demand, configuration happens in real-time. This on-the-fly setup introduces the risk of misconfiguration, which can lead to data loss, lack of encryption, or non-compliance with regulations.
These risks are magnified in the context of AI applications, which generate and process massive volumes of data and are increasingly deployed on Kubernetes.
Kyverno is a Kubernetes policy engine that allows users to define policies in a declarative, low-code format using YAML. This means that even teams without deep programming skills can define, apply, and manage policies that enforce key storage best practices such as data replication, encryption at rest, and minimum retention periods.
According to Patel, “A policy could be to replicate your data or to encrypt your data... But the nice thing about a policy-as-code approach is it is declarative.” Because these policies are written as code, they can be version-controlled and stored in repositories, making them easier to maintain and audit.
Patel provided real-world examples of how Kyverno policies can check for required data compression or ensure specific naming conventions are followed for storage classes. This type of automation not only improves security and compliance but also enhances operational efficiency by reducing the need for manual intervention.
For enterprises operating at scale, managing policies across dozens or even hundreds of clusters can become complex. To address this, there’s the Nirmata Control Hub, a centralized platform for managing Kyverno policies across an organization’s entire infrastructure.
The Nirmata Control Hub provides visibility into policy violations, highlights non-compliant resources, and includes automated remediation tools to resolve issues quickly. Patel explained that industries like finance, healthcare, telecom, and retail—where regulatory requirements are strict—are already using Kyverno and Nirmata Control Hub to ensure that workloads cannot move to production unless they meet compliance standards.
Patel emphasized the broader significance of policy-driven automation. Without it, organizations face a higher risk of data breaches, compliance failures, and operational inefficiencies. Automated policy enforcement not only strengthens security but also gives development teams greater agility by embedding compliance into the deployment process itself.
Discover how the strategic partnership between Nirmata and Rakuten Cloud is transforming cloud-native data governance and driving innovation in Kubernetes storage practices. To learn more, watch Patel’s full presentation on YouTube; it’s a must-see for anyone looking to improve storage practices in modern, dynamic Kubernetes environments.
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