Cloud-Native Persistent Storage: 4 Key Deployment Considerations

On the one hand, enterprise storage technologies are evolving and embracing cloud-native persistent storage, and on the other, more businesses are moving their applications to the cloud. For businesses on a journey to the deployment of cloud-native storage, there are a few key considerations that should lead their choice of Kubernetes system, says Romuald Vandepoel, cloud solution architect, StorageOS.

The modern concept of ‘enterprise storage’ has its roots in the implementation of hardware-based arrays with fiber channel storage area networks (SANs) for connectivity. As requirements developed, increasing market demand for unified infrastructure saw organizations around the world shift this key area of tech investment away from existing SANs towards IP-centric solutions.

While these networks delivered management and cost benefits at the time, the growing requirements for better application performance and throughput saw enterprise storage trends once again change course, heralding the era of hyper-converged infrastructure. As is now familiar to its many adopters, this approach integrates the traditional elements of storage, compute, networking, and management into a single solution.

Today, however, storage technologies have taken another significant step forward to embrace cloud-native persistent storage in the form of containers and container orchestration solutions. In many cases, these are based around systems such as the market-leading orchestration platform, Kubernetes.

Its accelerating worldwide adoption marks another seismic shift in the storage landscape. Indeed, Gartner predictsOpens a new window that by 2024, half of the global storage capacity will be deployed as software-defined storage (SDS). By 2025, 85% of global businesses will be running containers in production. Digging deeper into the trends only serves to underline the point:  there are over 6.5 million cloud-native developers – an increase of 1.8 million from this time last year – with 1.7 million using Kubernetes directly and 4 million using platforms automated with Kubernetes. 

As the adoption of cloud-native technologies continues to grow, users are focusing on rapid change. The impact of COVID-19 has only served to accelerate the process, moving applications, processes and huge volumes of data to the cloud more quickly to deliver on the innovation and digital transformation required to remain competitive.

Learn More: Top 10 Encrypted Cloud Storage Platforms in 2021

Key Deployment Considerations

For those on a journey to the deployment of cloud-native storage, what considerations should lead their choice of Kubernetes system? For today’s cloud-native workloads, it’s important to consider both how well the storage system will perform at the time of deployment and how the storage system can be operationalized. In doing so, there are some important areas of focus:

1. Performance monitoring

When an application graduates from its development phase and begins to deliver tangible strategic advantage, monitoring for both errors and performance issues (including those relating to storage) are among the most important ‘Day 2’ priorities.

For those reliant on legacy systems, many lack the instrumentation required to monitor storage-related performance. Without real-time and historic monitoring, there’s no way to focus on the detail required to diagnose issues such as performance problems. With the monitoring capabilities offered by today’s cloud-native storage systems, users can track performance changes over time and immediately understand the reasons behind a problem. What’s more, the right instrumentation can then enable them to focus on the root cause.

Learn More: Multi-Cloud Storage Management Mistakes

2. Best practice data placement

Adopting a Kubernetes storage system designed around best practices for where to place data can also help proactively address potential Day 2 problems. For instance, to maximize performance, data should be placed as close to the application using that data as possible. Secondly, data should also be replicated across failure domains which, in a cloud-based system, ensures that there is data replication across availability zones. If one zone goes down, users still retain access to the alternate availability zone.

3. Implementing technology upgrades

Upgrades are integral to any application lifecycle and may include new versions of Kubernetes, new data versions and new application versions. Kubernetes is highly effective at orchestrating and managing upgrades, but the storage system also needs to be flexible enough to work with Kubernetes during the ongoing upgrade process. Some storage systems utilize what’s known as a ‘Kubernetes Operator’, which is code that extends and automates the deployment and product lifecycle for a system, providing a more efficient installation approach.

4. Prioritizing high availability

Modern storage systems must be implemented with high availability from the outset to provide redundancy whilst protecting data in the event of infrastructure failures or network issues. By working with the assumption that something will go amiss at some point, application data can be set up to automatically failover to other nodes in a cluster to maintain uptime.

Learn More: Traditional Cloud Storage Is Broken, Adopt a Bottomless Data Strategy

Storage Is Not an Afterthought

Across today’s stateful applications, storage problems are among the main reasons for application performance problems and downtime. Ensuring IT teams have the tools and technologies to proactively monitor and log storage infrastructure is the only way to make the challenges associated with Kubernetes storage easy to address. By effectively managing the entire application lifecycle, organizations can ensure they are taking a holistic approach to the delivery of cloud-native storage management.

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