Container Storage and Data Protection for Applications on Kubernetes

Introduction

Cloud native application architecture relies on Kubernetes, the leading container management platform. The enterprise needs a storage solution that can keep up with the scale and volume of data processed by these applications. On-premises and cloud-based storage solutions, which were designed for traditional monolithic applications running on virtual machines (VMs), weren’t designed to run in cloud native environments and aren’t flexible enough to meet the requirements of the enterprise today.

Modern applications are implemented as discrete services that can be packaged and deployed independently in their own containers running on separate machines. Cloud native infrastructure is elastic, meaning it is controlled programmatically or declaratively to proactively meet changing compute needs. This design enables applications to quickly scale up and down based on demand, but requires nimble distributed data storage that scales along with the application. Traditional storage is simply not up to the task. To meet the needs of the enterprise, Kubernetes storage must be dynamic, automated, and application aware, and it must provide data protection in the form of intelligent backup and recovery at the container level.

As application architecture becomes distributed, ownership of application components becomes more dispersed. That’s one reason why storage policy, traditionally the domain of dedicated administrators and managers, is becoming a shared responsibility among teams ...