Cloudian Adds Kubernetes Operator to Object Storage System
Cloudian today announced it has added support for an Operator to make it easier to provision its object-based storage platform in Kubernetes environments.
Sanjay Jagad, senior director of products and solutions at Cloudian, says Cloudian Kubernetes S3 Operator provides a self-service tool through which DevOps teams can provision an object storage platform that is compatible with the S3 application programming interface (API) defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The goal, he says, is to make it easier for IT organizations to deploy and move stateful container applications as needed between an on-premises IT environment and any cloud service that supports the S3 API.
Cloudian is making the case for a distributed storage system that enables IT teams to globally manage appliances that store massive amounts of unstructured data via a single user interface. Most recently, the company added a set of analytics and health checks tools to enable IT teams to optimize the performance of its systems.
Jagad notes that market research firm Gartner is predicting that by 2022 more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today. Existing storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS) systems lack an API-based approach to managing storage that DevOps teams need to dynamically provision storage resources for microservices-based applications built using containers, he says, adding legacy storage systems that require an administrator to provision storage via a graphical user interface are not agile enough to support DevOps workflows that organizations rely on to build and deploy these types of applications.
There’s a lot of debate concerning the degree to which organizations will deploy stateful applications based on containers. Many organizations will opt to build stateless applications that store data on an external system. However, Jagad notes, that approach will increase the total cost of IT by adding another platform to manage beyond the Kubernetes cluster. By attaching storage to the Kubernetes cluster, he says, the overall IT environment is streamlined.
In addition, overall I/O performance should be higher for applications that tend to be latency sensitive because there are no gateways involved, he says.
Finally, object-based storage systems provide a more efficient means for storing unstructured data that can reduce costs by as much as 60%, Jagad says.
With more applications being developed for the public cloud, the number of applications that require access to object-based storage has increased steadily. These applications can be redeployed on-premises if necessary without requiring any type of translation layer, says Jagad. One of the reasons organizations are embracing Kubernetes is to make sure they don’t get locked into a specific cloud service provider.
Competition among storage vendors to provide next-generation systems that attach to Kubernetes clusters is already fierce. IT organizations will need to decide whether the storage systems they deploy will need to natively support Kubernetes. However, there will be plenty of greenfield Kubernetes environments where object-storage systems that attach directly to a Kubernetes cluster will be the only real viable option.
