Principles for Evaluating Enterprise Storage for Kubernetes & Cloud Native Applications

Straight out of DevOps land comes this missive: 90% of the Fortune 1000 are, restructuring their architectures to meet the challenges of the next decade, and migrating their applications from virtual and www.mcafee.com/activate product key traditional infrastructure to container solutions and Kubernetes (known industry-wide as K8s). It’s going to be www.mcafee/activate an interesting ride fraught with a huge level of misinformation as systems vendors slap a “K8s Ready” label on top of their preexisting products up www.mcafee.com/activate and down the stack. While the introduction of K8s may not be too challenging at the compute layer, it will offer mcafee.com/activate product key new complexity to the networking www.mcafee.com/activate download and storage layers which requires a new level of scrutiny on how containers are supported.

To help separate the signal from the noise, we’ve compiled ten key principles for evaluating on-premises, persistent storage platforms to support cloud native applications as you and your organization head down the inevitable path toward a container-centric future.

The Benefits and Challenges of Containers and Kubernetes

We hear a lot about containers and K8s today in conversations with our customers and partners and their desire to achieve www.mcafee/activate the automation, composability, velocity, scalability and efficiency benefits they’ve seen in initial.

Given these potential benefits, it’s obvious why large enterprises, laden with hundreds of applications, are moving aggressively to containers. But selecting the right storage, often the last layer of the stack to move, is essential www.mcafee.com/activate to realizing them, because hyperscale cloud native applications require persistent storage platforms with very unique characteristics.

As you embark on your journey, you will find systems providers touting their Container Storage Interface (CSI) which marks the most basic form of interoperability. But the storage layer needs more than just www.mcafee.com/activate download interoperability www.mcafee.com/activate product key; it should match the dynamism of new applications based on containers and Kubernetes. Here we offer www.mcafee/activate a framework mcafee.com/activate product key for evaluating storage for cloud native applications that goes beyond buzzwords and is designed to help you get the right storage capabilities to achieve container and cloud native success.

10 Principles for Evaluating Enterprise Cloud Native Storage

1. Application Centric
The storage should be presented to and consumed by the application, not by hypervisors, operating systems or other proxies that complicate and compromise system operation. Your storage system is likely based upon older abstractions of storage such as LUNs, volumes or pools. These once were workable for monolithic applications such as Oracle and SQL databases running on physical servers, but modern storage systems now use an “appinstance” or “storage instance” www.mcafee.com/activate construct that lets you apply templates programmatically, enabling your container workloads to rapidly consume and release resources as needs ebb and flow. For example, your DevOps team may spin up 100 Kubernetes or Docker containers a day, requiring a stateful, persistent appinstance for just that day and release it after an hour or two. This ensures your application gets what it needs and only when it needs it.

2. Platform Agnostic
The storage should be able to run anywhere in any location, with non-disruptive updates and expansions non-disruptive. While legacy arrays have proved reliable for blinding speed on monolithic applications, tuning them www.mcafee.com/activate product key introduces many restrictions, compromises in your usage models and often requires a fleet of highly individualized administrators www.mcafee/activate. Modern, cloud native workloads require a composable platform that can run in racks, aisles and multiple datacenters as YOUR needs grow, without requiring rebuilds and migrations to slow you and your users down. More importantly, in multi-node, scale-out systems, all upgrades MUST be rolling, non-disruptive and minimally impact performance. mcafee.com/activate product key Look for systems that use standard iSCSI and Ethernet for maximum flexibility as your needs grow to include multiple datacenters, stretch clusters, and www.mcafee.com/activate download other disaster recovery implementations.

3. Declarative and Composable
Storage resources should be declared and composed as required by the applications and services themselves, matching the compute and network layers. Policy-driven systems allow you to make changes to the underlying resources seamlessly from the container perspective. For example, set a policy that includes dedupe, performance and encryption and as you add or remove nodes, the system should www.mcafee.com/activate autonomously move  www.mcafee/activate and re-balance workloads across heterogeneous nodes that comprise the cluster. The system should automatically inventory resources and make split second decisions about the most efficient way to run your containers.

One additional tip is to ensure that these policies are changeable over time. As basic as it may sound, many systems based on policies give www.mcafee.com/activate product key the illusion that they are dynamic, but in practice are static. Test the ability to change policies and have those changes ripple through the data so that your storage is as dynamic as possible.

4. Programmable & API Driven
Storage resources must be able to be provisioned, consumed, moved, and managed by API. Even better, these actions should be mcafee.com/activate product key done autonomously by the system in response www.mcafee.com/activate download to application instantiation, which is at the heart of an infrastructure designed for self-service. Without this capability developers will not be able www.mcafee.com/activate to generate www.mcafee/activate their own storage when they want it, which becomes a bottleneck in the development process and requires the very thing that containers are designed to eliminate: manual intervention www.mcafee.com/activate product key. In practice, programmability allows you to query the storage system to assign and reclaim persistent volumes on an as needed basis.

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