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Cloud-native storage for Kubernetes with Rook

Memory

Article from ADMIN 49/2019

By Martin Loschwitz

Kubernetes is known to be inflexible when it comes to persistent storage, but Rook now offers cloud-native storage and seeks to achieve harmony.

A witticism making the rounds at IT conferences these days says that Internet providers operate servers to make their customers serverless. On the one hand, customers increasingly strive to move their setups into the cloud and avoid dealing with the operation of classic IT infrastructure. On the other hand, no software can run on air and goodwill.

Today's IT infrastructure providers, therefore, face challenges that hardly differ from those of earlier years – specifically, persistent data. Clearly, modern architectural approaches that comprise microservices are increasingly based on dynamic handling of data, fragmentation, cluster mechanisms, and, last but not least, inherent redundancy.

None of this changes the fact that in every setup, a point comes in which data needs to be stored safely somewhere, such as when you need to avoid the failure of a single server that would cause container and customer data to disappear into a black hole.

Cloud environments such as OpenStack [1] take a classic approach to the problem by providing components that act as intermediaries between the physical memory on one side and the virtual environments on the other. The virtual environments are typical virtual machines (VMs), so persistent storage can be connected without problem.

Containers, on the other hand, present a different battle plan: Kubernetes [2] (Figure 1), Docker [3], and the many alternatives somehow all have a solution for persistent storage of data, but they all do not really fit in with the concept of cloud native.

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