Why you should look to software-defined infrastructure for container deployments

Firms around the world are moving away from monoliths and towards more streamlined, agile IT environments leveraging containers and microservices. These new deployments rely on orchestration systems like Kubernetes, as well as experts who know how to make the most of such tools.

StorageOS is one such expert. A finalist in the Cloud Excellence Awards 2020, for Software-Defined Infrastructure Product of the Year, the company excels in solving storage challenges.

"StorageOS is a software-defined cloud-native storage platform, delivering persistent storage for Kubernetes and stateful applications. Our mission is to solve real-life storage problems," says founder and CEO Alex Chircop.

"Our platform is installed in production across the globe, enabling enterprises to store, deliver and protect the data that powers their businesses. Customers include Accenture, DHL, IMT, Lloyds, Civo, EBRC and many more."

StorageOS is a software-defined solution deployed as a container, combining the best of both worlds. As well as being able to run anywhere - on-prem, in the cloud or in a hosted environment - it is fully scalable, application-centric and robust in the case of component failure.

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If containers do have a fault, it is their inability, by default, to store information after they are shut down. This requires persistent storage, and StorageOS has addressed the challenge this year with the launch of StorageOS V2 - its entry into the Cloud Excellence Awards.

"We started thinking about this release a while ago, based on conversations with our customers, and observations on the Kubernetes landscape in general. We saw two important emerging trends:

"Firstly, we noticed customers deploying much bigger clusters as they gain experience with Kubernetes and push more workloads to their clusters. Bigger clusters present several engineering challenges. As the number of nodes within the cluster scales, distributed consensus becomes a progressively harder problem to solve. At the same time, bigger clusters typically suffer from higher amounts of transient failures - overloaded machines and network interruptions. These all require robust error handling to maintain a stable production environment.

"Secondly, we saw the desire to deploy multiple clusters in varying topologies and consume storage across cluster boundaries. One pattern we saw often was the desire to run a centralised production storage cluster and mount storage from satellite development clusters. Another is to replicate data between datacentres, either synchronously or asynchronously.

"We built StorageOS V2 with these observations in mind."

Chircop and the rest of the team are now waiting for the results to be announced on the 12^th November.

"The Cloud Excellence Awards showcases and recognises innovation, talent, and success from across the industry. It is an honour to be a finalist this year - this nomination helps to reaffirm our position in leading the way to cloud-native storage."