Today, Pure Storage is excited to announce Pure Service Orchestrator. It is now possible to deliver container storage-as-a-service to empower your developers to build and deploy scale-out, microservices applications. The agility that your developers expect they could only get from the public cloud is now possible, on premise!
In this blog, we’ll discuss why the adoption of containers is exploding, how the the lack of persistent storage threatens to slow adoption, and why a newer, smarter approach to storage delivery for containerized application environments is needed.
Before you go further, you might want to checkout our light board video on Pure Service Orchestrator.
Businesses are rapidly moving from monolithic, scale-up applications to virtualized applications and now to scale-out, microservices applications. These new applications are typically built on containers.
Containers are lightweight, compact and flexible runtime environments that package together your application code and all its dependencies, and decouple application runtime from infrastructure. This decoupling enables portability. Because they are lightweight, containers boot up and run instantly facilitating scalability. Additionally, containers allow greater modularity which makes them an essential building block for microservices.
No wonder container adoption is exploding. IDC predicts that by 2021, 80% of application development on cloud platforms will use microservices and cloud functions, and over 95% of new microservices will be deployed in containers[1].
Initial adoption of containers is showing up mostly in dev/test, web services, data pipelines, and stateless applications. But the lack of persistent storage support threatens to limit adoption of containers for mission-critical, persistent applications.
In 2017, our New Stack team kicked this solution off and built seamless integration with container platforms and orchestration engines via plugins for Docker, Kubernetes FlexVolume Driver and more, so you can leverage persistent storage support in containerized environments.
This was only the beginning!
We quickly realized that device plugins alone are not enough to deliver the cloud experience your developers expect today. This gap is amplified by the highly fluid nature of containerized environments. Stateless containers are spun up and spun down within seconds while stateful containers live a lot longer. Some containers require block while others want file storage. And, your container environment can rapidly scale to 1000s of containers that can push the boundaries of any single storage system. How do you handle storage provisioning and scaling for such a dynamic environment?
What if you could truly deliver a storage-as-a-service experience to your containerized application environment?
Here’s what we thought a seamless container storage-as-a-service should look like:
Pure Service Orchestrator is designed to provide a similar experience to your developers that they expect they can only get from the public cloud. Service Orchestrator integrates seamlessly with the container orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes) and functions as the control plane virtualization layer that enables your containerized environment to move away from consuming storage-as-a-device to consuming storage-as-a-service:
Now that you know what Pure Service Orchestrator is capable of, you can see it in action here:
Many developers are demanding to go beyond containers as-a-service to platform-as-a-service. We took care of that as well! Check out this blogpost to learn about our reference architecture for all-flash, on-prem platform-as-a-service with Red Hat OpenShift.
Of course, delivering a true cloud experience demands not only cloud architecture, but also a cloud consumption model, and we have some exciting announcements in this area too. Checkout our ES2 (Evergreen Storage Service) blog to learn more.
Pure Service Orchestrator is just getting started. Over time, it will continue to get smarter and more effortless.We’re building a world-class New Stack team that is thinking outside-the-box and working on delivering innovative new capabilities with each release, beginning with the initial release of Service Orchestrator in late 2018. We couldn’t be more excited!
Now, you can deliver container storage as-a-service (even PaaS)! Effortlessly extend your infrastructure beyond existing scale-up and virtualized applications to support containerized, persistent applications – all on Shared Accelerated Storage infrastructure. That’s the power of a Data-Centric Architecture!
For more information on announcements this year at Pure//Accelerate, check out our overall launch blog, Data Centric Architecture Powers Digital Business.
[1] IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2018 Predictions