Bring Storage and Databases Under Kubernetes Control

In this era, enterprises are doing everything they can to streamline the software development process. As a result, more software development teams are leaning on Kubernetes, mainly because of the flexibility and agility it provides for containerized application development. In fact, according to a recent survey of Kubernetes experts, 80% of organizations will build most of their apps on Kubernetes within the next five years.

It’s time for organizations to take their Kubernetes use to the next level by bringing their storage and databases under Kubernetes control. This would allow developers to remove the additional steps required to access the requisite storage when building and deploying apps. In fact, managing storage and databases within Kubernetes has multiple benefits — benefits that speak to the very heart of why developer teams use Kubernetes in the first place.

The Heart and Purpose of Kubernetes 

The DevOps world has come a long way since the words “build once, deploy anywhere” were first uttered. While the core meaning of the phrase still drives much of application development today, it’s likely appropriate to add an additional phrase: “Build once, deploy anywhere, much faster.”

This is why platform engineering is slowly transforming from a singular job description into a business function within DevOps. The “much faster” concept is tied directly to the two reasons platform engineering exists:

• To increase developer velocity (also called reducing developer toil) by providing self-service capabilities for code upgrades, CI/CD pipeline integration, storage, network and compute requirements to enable faster testing and piloting of applications.
• To enable a faster ramp to production (or reducing operations toil) by providing T-shirt sizing for different deployment sizes, and golden paths to enable rapid, preconfigured infrastructure. This includes adding guardrails to minimize delays and failures during production onboarding. Also, platform engineering adds elastic scaling of infrastructure resources, and resilience in terms of backup and disaster recovery is a key factor in reducing Day 2 operational issues.

As the developer world continues its march toward faster development and faster innovation, appropriate data storage can, at times, be forgotten until the very minute it’s needed. At that moment, even though a developer has the application and the containers and is eager to test, they now must:

1. Halt their progress.
2. Go to a storage admin.
3. Request the requisite storage to continue.

Imagine you’re driving a car. You’re ready to enter the on-ramp and you have the steering wheel, the navigation and the gearshift at your fingertips. However, the indicator, which is necessary to switch lanes, is located in the back seat. This slows down your ability to travel to the next place in your journey. With data storage under Kubernetes, the agility necessary to “enter the on-ramp” to testing and production is more easily available, providing a more streamlined DevOps experience.

Benefits of Bringing Storage Under Kubernetes Control

While the overall benefit of bringing storage and databases under Kubernetes control lies in agility, this transition also has very specific benefits. Let’s take a look at a few:

• Developer self-service for apps and data: Service requests for compute, networking, storage, backup and disaster recovery can all be made simultaneously with ticketless provisioning. The unfortunate alternative is a fractured and siloed approach to each. When data storage is under Kubernetes control, platform engineers can create storage golden paths and T-shirt sizes for different application classes.
• Unified intelligent management for apps and data: When you manage your data inside Kubernetes, you will have one common control plane, which will make management much simpler for the operations team. It will also be easier to integrate deeper with K8s APIs and add value to cluster operations. For example, you can avoid nodes that are down for an upgrade and avoid replicated nodes on the same rack.
• Security and governance: Kubernetes will provide you with role-based access control that ensures only authorized parties are able to access your sensitive data. K8s also rotates secrets and access credentials, which helps reduce data breaches.
• Performance: Kubernetes data management provides storage optimization and faster allocation to help your application perform better. You’re able to scale your storage as you scale your compute needs, which usually occurs as the application grows. The distributed storage model creates less connection pressure on backend storage at scale.
• Cost: Managing data under Kubernetes lets different application tiers have different storage performance, which creates better control over total storage costs.
• App resilience: Deploy high availability, backup and disaster recovery, which are app-consistent data operations due to container granular volumes and snapshots.
• Database as a service: Developers use a wide range of open source databases; however, many IT departments do not support most of them. If you use a containerized version of the database and a Kubernetes operator, your organization can offer a wide range of databases to developers in a self-service model, with built-in resilience and easy Day 1 and Day 2 operations.

So How Do I Do This? 

Bringing your databases and storage under Kubernetes’ control ultimately depends on the data services platform you use. Many platform engineers and IT teams are aware of the dangers connected to moving any sort of data from one environment to another. However, with Portworx by Pure Storage, a data services platform that works seamlessly with Kubernetes, organizations can create a straight path from where databases currently exist to Kubernetes, while also having the ability to seamlessly connect to other databases.

Taking Kubernetes to the Next Level

As the world requires innovation at faster speeds and on a larger scale, developers will act as the backbone of that innovation. Therefore, it is up to organizations, IT departments and platform engineers to create a DevOps environment that maximizes developer time and resources. Controlling storage and databases in Kubernetes is perfectly suited to this goal. It removes an unnecessary step in the production process while adding valuable DevOps benefits that will empower developers. If data storage is the foundation for any good application, it’s only fitting that data lives where applications are created daily.