Advantages of Using Kubernetes Distributed Storage for Your Business

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Many production workloads need persistent storage — file, block, or object. Kubernetes manages temporary options, but for persistent storage, you’ll need to understand Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) and how to integrate these with your existing data center configuration.

To support stateful applications, you need a storage solution that provides portability through PVCs and offers efficiency through cloning, deduplication, compaction, thin provisioning, and automatic tiering to less-expensive cloud objects until needed.

Scalability

Kubernetes allows enterprises to scale horizontally so that you can grow or shrink their infrastructure based on their application needs. This eliminates the need for manual processing and saves time and money. This enables your business to become more efficient and drive better results.

The scalability of kubernetes distributed storage makes it ideal for running stateful applications in multi-cloud environments. This is because it can support a variety of different storage vendors. Additionally, the platform can also automate DevOps processes. This can help your business to create a digital solution that is affordable and drives higher productivity.

A Kubernetes cluster with true Cloud Native Storage (CNS) offers a unified compute inherently scalable infrastructure. This approach can reduce operational costs by up to 40% and improve infrastructure utilization. In addition, it provides common data management and protection workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Traditional storage systems use CSI connectors to bind containers to a specific hardware device. This can lead to a single point of failure and slow-mount times. ionir Kubernetes storage uses container-native storage to overcome these problems. This enables you to migrate to a new environment without a forklift upgrade. In addition, ionir provides self-healing and disaster recovery capabilities. This can protect your data from loss and downtime and ensure business continuity. It can even run in a public cloud environment and provide access to multiple storage vendors.

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Security

If you’re using Kubernetes to run stateful applications, ensuring that data persists across container restarts or pod migrations can be challenging. Kubernetes Distributed Storage provides a way to ensure that your data stays intact.

This is accomplished through volumes-abstracted storage resources that help you save and share data between ephemeral containers. Each container can stake a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) request to provision storage resources on the node that hosts the container. PVCs are created by a cluster manager, the service that manages the nodes in your Kubernetes environment.

When you deploy a PVC, the cluster manager will connect it to an external storage system through a network plugin. These plugins are the entry point for attackers who can exploit them to access sensitive information. Using a vulnerable network, plugin could expose your entire cluster to attackers and allow them to gain control over your data. To prevent this, you can use a secure network plugin that supports the CSI protocol. 

Flexibility

The ability to scale horizontally is a critical feature for Kubernetes because it allows businesses to grow or shrink their infrastructure based on business needs. This can help reduce costs by allowing enterprises to avoid overprovisioning resources and wasting money on equipment that isn’t needed.

To ensure scalability, it is important to deploy a cluster with the right hardware. For production, it is recommended to use two CPUs with 32 cores each, 2TB of error-correcting RAM, and at least four SSDs. It is also important to have an odd number of master components to ensure a quorum. It is also a good idea to choose an SSD for the etcd disk since it writes to the disk frequently, and even the slightest delay can impact performance.

While Kubernetes has built-in features that enable scaling, it also supports third-party tools to simplify the process. 

Storage efficiency is another key consideration when deploying a Kubernetes cluster on-premises. Many developers will overestimate their storage needs, wasting space and unnecessary costs. To address this issue, working with a storage provider offering a flexible deployment model is important. For example, with ionir Kubernetes Native Storage, administrators can deploy a Ceph cluster from a YAML file without manually configuring any servers or SAN/NAS networks.

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Reliability

Kubernetes offers some benefits for enterprises, including the ability to scale horizontally and automatically. This feature allows businesses to grow or shrink their infrastructure based on demand, saving them money. It also helps eliminate downtime and ensures that applications are always available.

Kubernetes is open-source software that is supported by a large community. This makes it easy to find developers with the necessary skills to make improvements. Additionally, it offers a low learning curve and enables companies to deploy microservices quickly.

It uses a distributed storage system called Persistent Volumes to ensure that Kubernetes is always running smoothly. This system hides the details of the storage implementation from applications and users and provides a cloud-native way to connect to various storage systems.

Persistent volumes enable administrators to deploy any storage system in a cluster, including traditional external storage and SAN systems. This approach eliminates the need to manage multiple storage solutions and enables the cluster to scale easily.

The Kubernetes community has developed a robust set of tools for managing storage in the cluster. These tools include a control plane and disk manager for each volume, which manages snapshots, cloning, policies, and metrics for the volume. Monitoring performance with these tools is also possible, which can help administrators identify issues and optimize resources.