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This put up was co-authored by Maneesh Sah, Corporate Vice President, Azure Storage Engineering.
Container is the brand new digital machine (VM). Whether you’re a CTO, enterprise architect, main DevOps groups, or constructing functions, you will have already launched into the journey to containerize your functions or are raring to go—to maximise the advantages of scale, flexibility, and price. With Kubernetes on the helm, containers have quickly grow to be a hotbed of innovation and a crucial space of transformation for enterprises and startups alike. After the preliminary give attention to stateless containers, working excessive scale stateful workloads on containers has now grow to be the norm. To run business-critical, enterprise-grade functions on Kubernetes within the cloud, clients want extremely scalable, cost-efficient, and performant storage—built-for and with intrinsic assist for containers. Today, we’re excited to announce the preview of Azure Container Storage, the business’s first platform-managed container native storage service within the public cloud, offering finish to finish storage administration and orchestration for stateful functions to run effectively at scale on Azure.
Why Azure Container Storage?
With speedy adoption of Kubernetes, we see a surge of manufacturing workloads, each cloud-first in addition to app modernization, that want container-native persistent storage for databases (corresponding to MySQL), huge knowledge (corresponding to ElasticSearch), messaging functions (corresponding to Kafka), and steady integration and steady supply (CI/CD) programs (corresponding to Jenkins). To run these stateful functions, clients want operational simplicity to deploy and scale storage tightly coupled with the containerized functions. Customers immediately, nevertheless, want to decide on between utilizing VM centric cloud storage choices, retrofitted to containers, or deploying and self-managing open-source container storage options within the cloud—main to large operational overhead, scaling bottlenecks, and excessive price.
To present clients with a seamless end-to-end expertise, container native storage must allow:
- Seamless quantity mobility throughout the cluster to maximise pod availability with out bottlenecks on quantity attaches and deletes.
- Rapid scaling of enormous variety of volumes as software pods scale up or scale out as wanted.
- Optimal price-performance for any quantity sizes, particularly small volumes that require greater enter/output operations per second (IOPS).
- Simple and constant quantity administration expertise throughout backing storage varieties to match workload necessities, corresponding to extraordinarily low latency ephemeral disks versus persistent or scalable distant storage.
Azure Container Storage addresses these necessities by enabling clients to focus their consideration on working workloads and functions quite than managing storage. Azure Container Storage is our first step in direction of offering a transformative storage expertise. As a crucial addition to Azure’s suite of container companies, it should assist organizations of all sizes to streamline their containerization efforts and enhance their total storage administration capabilities.
Leveraging Azure Container Storage
Azure Container Storage is a purpose-built, software-defined storage resolution that delivers a constant management airplane throughout a number of backing storage choices to satisfy the wants of stateful container functions. This totally managed service offers a quantity administration layer for stateful container functions enabling storage orchestration, knowledge administration, Kubernetes-aware knowledge safety, and rule-based efficiency scaling.
Aligning with open-source container native storage approaches, Azure Container Storage runs microservices-based storage controllers in Kubernetes, to summary the storage administration layer from pods and backing storage, enabling portability throughout Kubernetes nodes and skill to mount completely different storage choices as proven within the determine.
Azure Container Storage parts embrace:
- A Storage Pool, which is a set of storage sources grouped and offered as a unified storage entity on your AKS cluster.
- A knowledge companies layer, accountable for replication, encryption, and different add-on performance absent within the underlying storage supplier.
- A protocol layer, which exposes provisioned volumes by way of NVMe-oF protocol to software pods.
With this method Azure Container Storage presents a number of differentiated experiences to clients on Azure, together with:
Lowering the full price of possession (TCO) by offering skill to scale IOPS on smaller quantity sizes, to assist containerized functions which have dynamic and fluctuating enter/output (IO) necessities. This is enabled utilizing shared provisioning of capability and efficiency on a storage pool, which will be leveraged by a number of volumes. With shared provisioning, clients can now maximize efficiency throughout software containers whereas retaining TCO down. Instead of allocating capability and IOPS per persistent quantity (PV), which generally results in overprovisioning, clients can now create PVs and dynamically share sources from a Storage Pool.
Rapid scale-out of stateful pods, achieved utilizing distant community protocols like NVME-oF and iSCSI to mount PV, enabling easy scaling on AKS throughout Compute and Storage. This is particularly useful for container deployments that begin small and iteratively add sources. Responsiveness is essential to make sure that functions usually are not starved or disrupted, both throughout initialization or scaling in manufacturing. Additionally, software resiliency is essential with pod respawns throughout the cluster requiring speedy PV motion. Leveraging distant community protocols permits us to tightly couple with the pod lifecycle to assist extremely resilient excessive scale stateful functions on AKS.
Simplified constant quantity administration interface backed by native and distant storage choices enabling clients to allocate and use storage by way of the Kubernetes management airplane. This signifies that clients can leverage ephemeral disks, Azure Disks in addition to Azure Elastic SAN by way of a unified administration interface to satisfy workload wants. For occasion, ephemeral storage could also be preferable for Cassandra to realize the bottom latency, whereas Azure Disks is appropriate for PostgreSQL or different database options. This unified expertise supplied by Azure Container Storage simplifies the administration of persistent volumes, whereas delivering a complete resolution to deal with the broad vary of efficiency necessities of assorted containerized workloads.
Fully built-in day-2 experiences, together with knowledge safety, cross-cluster restoration, and observability offering operational simplicity for purchasers who must create buyer scripts or sew collectively disparate instruments immediately. Customers can orchestrate Kubernetes-aware backup of the persistent volumes built-in with AKS usually obtainable to streamline the end-to-end experiences for working stateful container workloads on Azure.
Refer to the technical neighborhood weblog put up for extra particulars about Azure Container Storage.
Getting began
Sign up to take part within the preview and deploy your first stateful container software immediately.
Refer to the Azure Container Storage documentation to be taught extra concerning the service.
We are assured that this new provide will considerably speed up app modernization and cloud migration. We sit up for listening to your suggestions. Please e-mail us at azcontainerstorage@microsoft.com with any questions.