How SDS is helping the Containerized Storage Process

By CIOReview | Tuesday, December 11, 2018

The desire for agility without compromising on the stability and control has driven enterprises to move towards container-based and DevOps processes. After proving its mettle in the development process, containers are proving effective for storage purposes also. Containers provide reliable and persistent storage to the developers without compromising on the development speed of the application.

Traditional processes have been outdated in today’s development environment. Earlier the development teams used to be skeptical about new processes as security, stability, and control was an issue, but with the introduction of containers and DevOps processes those issues have been taken care of with improved application speed. The traditional storage processes and virtual machines don’t meet the enterprise’s advanced storage needs. Enterprises look for an efficient and streamlined solution that provides granular support and also propels the development team forward. Containers provide a practical solution which ensures that the application data is consistently available and survivable beyond the life of a container.

One of the best attributes that containers provide is an easy disposability feature which cannot apply to the application data. The data needs to be readily available at the time of any contingencies like container or disk failure or any corruption. Software-defined storage (SDS) allows the developers to package storage within their containers. SDS helps to make the storage a part of containers, which enables it to become a part of the entire development process. This type of container-native storage helps to bypass the administrator’s permission to access storage. The developers can directly dial up the amount of storage they need for a containerized application. SDS allows developers to have more control and autonomy over their applications as they no longer need to request for storage provisioning. In addition to the control and autonomy over their applications, developers can also use platforms such as kubernetes to manage their container storage automatically. Kubernetes allows the developers to focus on the development process rather than focusing on the management of data storage.

Container-based storage is in its nascent stage only and we will explore more advantages of open source container storage as more enterprises invest in container based storage.