Since our launch of Pure Service Orchestrator (PSO) earlier this year, our NewStack team has been working hard to further enhance the container storage-as-a-service experience for our customers. We started off with delivering on our promise of effortless on-demand storage for containerized applications for your private cloud. But the cloud strategy for our customers is evolving – we’re headed to a world of hybrid applications. Naturally, the next step for PSO was to go beyond on-prem, and extend its capabilities to enable hybrid cloud operations.
We’re super excited about Pure’s announcement of Pure Storage cloud data services and Pure Storage Cloud Block Store for AWS! With Pure’s software running natively in the cloud, we are able to extend Pure’s simplicity, efficiency and automation capabilities to the public cloud. Check out our launch announcement to learn more about what’s new.
What does this mean for your containerized application workloads?
Enabling mobility across clouds
Cloud Block Store is Pure’s software running in AWS cloud, which means you will get all the benefits of Pure’s reliability, efficiency and performance at the storage layer for your mission critical applications running in the cloud. And that’s not all. Cloud Block Store is built from the ground up to work with Pure Service Orchestrator. Your Cloud Block Store arrays can be attached to a Pure Service Orchestrator fleet to provide container storage as a service in your AWS environment.
Your persistent containerized applications will run seamlessly anywhere across your hybrid cloud, while leveraging the automated smart provisioning, elastic scaling and transparent recovery capabilities of Pure Service Orchestrator everywhere. This means you can run database apps, analytics apps and CI/CD pipelines powered by containers anywhere across your on-prem and public cloud deployments effortlessly without worrying about where your application runs and where your persistent volumes are located.
Run anywhere, seamlessly
Having Pure Service Orchestrator on premises and in the cloud unlocks several new hybrid cloud use cases for your stateful containerized applications. Migrate applications between clouds and run them anywhere, use public cloud as a DR target, run hybrid test/dev and production environments or multi-tier applications running across clouds – while provisioning storage for containers the exact same way everywhere.
The demo video below highlights how you can now easily migrate containerized applications to the cloud by using the exact same YAML configuration files to provision apps in the cloud and on-premises. This is powerful because it enables you to move applications across your hybrid cloud without having to worry about where your application is deployed and where its backend data is located.
What makes this possible
These use cases are made possible thanks to,
- The ability of FlashArray™ and Cloud Block Store for AWS to bi-directionally replicate snapshots between each other
- Common REST APIs on-premises and in public cloud, which enable automation of snapshot restores to named volumes
- The ability of Pure Service Orchestrator to easily import an existing volume and mount it as a ready-to-use volume in a container
Pure Service Orchestrator: Under the Covers
Pure Service Orchestrator integrates seamlessly with container orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Mesosphere DCOS, and functions as the control plane virtualization layer that enables your containerized environments to move away from consuming storage-as-a-device to consuming storage-as-a-service. It provisions the best-suited storage to containers automatically by assessing array performance, capacity and health in real time, while adhering to customer policies.
PSO scales across multiple FlashArray™ and FlashBlade™ units, supporting a mix of file and block storage, with the astonishing ease of expanding your storage service with a single command so you can start small and scale as the needs of your containerized environments grow.
With automatic failover in case of a Kubernetes node failure, and its ability to prevent data corruption in situations such as a Kubernetes split-brain scenario, Pure Service Orchestrator ensures that your container storage services stay robust for applications running on premises or in public clouds. Check out this blog post to learn more about how Pure Service Orchestrator works.
Pure Service Orchestrator now extends into Cloud Block Store to deliver a newer, smarter approach to storage delivery for containerized application environments on premises and in public clouds, enabling true hybrid operations.
There’s more in store
As promised, Pure Service Orchestrator continues to get smarter and more effortless. We can’t wait to share with you the host of innovations we have in-store for future releases. So stay tuned to hear more from us.
To get started with Pure Service Orchestrator, download our latest Kubernetes FlexVolume Driver or Docker Volume Plugin, depending on which target platform you plan to use.
To see learn more about new hybrid cloud use cases you can unlock with Pure’s cloud data services, check out our launch blogs.
