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Red Hat PaaS hyperconverged storage

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Article from ADMIN 42/2017

By Thorsten Scherf

More and more companies are outsourcing their applications to containers. We look at storage management and how storage of persistent data can be leveraged within containers.

The ability to provide persistent storage for containers, and thus make the data independent of container life, can help containers make further inroads into enterprise environments. Red Hat provides hyperconverged storage in a container platform based on Docker and Kubernetes with a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution known as OpenShift Container Platform.

Volatile Containers

Just as virtual machines originally formed the basis of cloud-based environments, today, containers help boost and expand the cloud landscape. Unlike virtual machines, containers do not require a hypervisor or their own operating system and thus run directly within the system on which the container is started. This arrangement is good not only for developers, who can thus very quickly and independently provision new containers in which to develop, deploy, and test applications, but also for system administrators, because containers are very easy to manage, often with fewer dependency problems when installing applications. IT managers are also happy because of the lower costs that containers offer, as well as the increased productivity of their teams. New containers can be provisioned within seconds. Downtime as a team waits for the deployment of a new system can thus be eliminated in most cases.

Another difference between containers and virtual machines is that containers tend to be regarded as short-lived objects, whereas virtual machines are intended more for long-term use – thus, the origin of the often-used pets vs. cattle meme, in which virtual machines represent cute pets with names, and containers are anonymous, unnamed critters. At the beginning of their success story, containers were often only used for stateless applications. Why this is so, quickly becomes clear if you take a closer look at the life cycle of a container.

Typically, a container is started on an arbitrary host in the cloud

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