This week Chris records a live podcast episode with Niraj Tolia, co-founder and CEO at Kasten Inc. As a follow-up to online discussions that dive into how container storage should be presented to Kubernetes (and other container) environments, this episode reviews some of Chris’ thoughts and Niraj’s opinions on the market as to how persistent storage should evolve.

The discussion starts by reviewing the idea of either block or file storage for container environments and moves on to discuss whether application-based replication could simply replace the need to have a persistent storage back-end. The Container Storage Interface (CSI) is one way vendors are trying to address the issue of storage abstraction, but it seems the technology still has some way to go in terms of metadata management.

The conversation moves next to thoughts around delivering more than more than just block and file storage to container environments. Perhaps there’s a need to deliver higher-level storage functionality (like structured data) to applications as part of the container management framework.

Finally the conversation wraps up with a discussion on Day 2 issues – managing security, audit, compliance and other operational challenges in an enterprise environment.

You can find more about Kasten and their data protection solution for containers at kasten.io.

Elapsed Time: 00:36:03

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:02:10 – Should we use block or file for container storage?* 00:03:55 – Deeper dive, how are block devices presented?* 00:05:40 – Most K8S block devices are shared in single reader mode* 00:07:20 – Raft & PAXOS provides consensus mechanisms to manage LUNs* 00:08:20 – Should we just rely on application-based replication?* 00:10:15 – CSI – Container Storage Interface* 00:12:30 – Metadata management – still an issue* 00:16:00 – Are virtual storage arrays a solution?* 00:18:55 – Should container environments provide more “plumbing” to the application?* 00:19:40 – Storage arrays should be simpler….* 00:21:00 – Other storage protocols & solutions are available* 00:24:00 – Platform storage – K8S could provide higher level storage services* 00:26:30 – Day 2 – how will enterprises meet security & audit concerns?* 00:32:00 – Google’s Query of Death!* 00:32:45 – Shared DAS – with NVMe – could be the future of container storage* 00:34:50 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #53 – Kubernetes and Persistent Storage with Evan Powell* What is the Container Storage Interface (CSI)?* Should I Be Backing Up Containers?* Block is Not the Solution for Persistent Container Storage

Copyright (c) 2016-2019 Storage Unpacked. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #tmpf.