Category: Cloud Storage

Scaling Storage in Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud Environments

Pekon Gupta Leave a comment

As data growth in enterprises continues to skyrocket, striking balance between cost and scalability becomes a challenge. Businesses face key decision on how to deploy their cloud service, whether on premises, in hybrid cloud or in multicloud deployments. So, what are enterprise IT organizations supposed to do, given that ‘run anything anywhere’ is becoming more important than ever? 

Find out on June 11, 2020, when the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will host a live webcast, “Storage Scalability in Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud Environments.” This webcast will help architects and consumers of hybrid cloud and multicloud storage solutions better understand:

Read More

Business Resiliency in a Kubernetes World

Jim Fister Leave a comment

At the 2018 KubeCon keynote, Monzo Bank explained the potential risk of running a single massive Kubernetes cluster. A minor conflict between etcd and Java led to an outage during one of their busiest business days, prompting questions, like “If a cluster goes down can our business keep functioning?”  Understanding the business continuity implications of multiple Kubernetes clusters is an important topic and key area of debate.

It’s an opportunity for the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) to host “A Multi-tenant Multi-cluster Kubernetes “Datapocalypse” is Coming” – a live webcast on June 23, 2020 where Kubernetes expert, Paul Burt, will dive into:

Read More

The Challenges IoT Brings to Storage and Data Strategy

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

Data generated from the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing exponentially. More and more we are seeing compute and inference move to the edge. This is driven by the growth in capability to not only generate data from sensors, devices, and by people operating in the field, but also by the interaction between those devices.

This new source of IoT data and information brings with it unique challenges to the way we store and transmit data as well as the way we need to curate it. It’s the topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will tackle at our live webcast on May 14, 2020, The influence of IoT on Data Strategy. In this webcast we will look at:

Read More

Addressing Cloud Security Threats with Standards

Eric Hibbard Leave a comment

In a recent SNIA webinar, Cloud Standards: What They Are, Why You Should Care, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) highlighted some of the key cloud computing standards being developed and published by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 38 (Cloud Computing and Distributed Platforms) and SC 27 (Information security, cybersecurity and privacy protection) standards committees. While ISO and IEC are not the only organizations producing cloud computing standards and specifications (e.g., ITU-T, OASIS, NIST, ENISA, SNIA, etc.), their standards, sometime developed jointly with ITU-T, can play a role in addressing WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) issues. More importantly, they provide a baseline of cloud terminology, concepts, guidance/requirements, and expectations that are recognized internationally.

Read More

Pay Attention to These Cloud Standards

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

What’s going on in the world of cloud standards? Since the initial publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing in NIST SP 800-145 in 2011, international standards development organizations (SDOs) have sought to refine and expand the cloud computing landscape. On February 13, 2020 at our next live SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webcast “Cloud Standards: What They Are, Why You Should Care” we will dive into the cloud standards worth noting as Eric Hibbard, standards expert and ISO editor, will discuss:

Read More

Answering Your Kubernetes Storage Questions

Paul Burt Leave a comment

Our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) Kubernetes in the Cloud series generated a lot of interest, but also more than a few questions. The interest is a great indicator of Kubernetes rising profile in the world of computing.

Following the third episode in the series, we’ve chosen a few questions that might help to better explain (or bring additional context to) our presentation. This post is our answer to your very important questions.

If you’re new to this webcast series about running Kubernetes in the cloud, you can catch the three parts here:

The rest of this article includes your top questions from, and our answers to, Part 3:

Q. What databases are best suited to run on Kubernetes?

Read More

Kubernetes Links & Resources to Keep You in the Know

Mike Jochimsen Leave a comment

Our recent SNIA CSTI webcast, “Kubernetes in the Cloud (Part 3): (Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Stateful Workloads” offered a wealth of insight on how to address the challenges of running stateful workloads in Kubernetes. This webcast was the third installment of our Kubernetes in the Cloud webcast series and it is now available on-demand as are “Kubernetes in the Cloud (Part 1)” and “Kubernetes in the Cloud (Part 2).”

Our expert presenters, Paul Burt and Ingo Fuchs, have provided additional resources to help keep you in the know on Kubernetes. Here they all are:

Read More

Kubernetes in the Cloud Q&A

Michelle Tidwell Leave a comment

Kubernetes is a hot topic these days, generating lots of interest and questions. The goal of our SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative Kubernetes in the Cloud webcast series is to cut through the hype and provide a vendor neutral look at what Kubernetes is and how it is being used. Our most recent webcast, Kubernetes in the Cloud (Part 2), generated some interesting questions. Here are answers from our expert presenters.

Q. If I’m running my Kubernetes infrastructure at a cloud service provider, do I need CSI support by the cloud provider? If this is not available, I will need a virtual storage array that provides CSI leveraging the underlying cloud storage. Do you know whether there are solutions on the market that I can deploy as a virtual machine at my cloud provider?

A. Current solutions using the CSI interface for public cloud storage are not available at this point. It will be up to the cloud provider to decide whether to support those interfaces to their storage layers.

Q. Does each pod run on one CPU core? I am trying to understand how to size the server configuration?

A. Containers use Linux cgroups to limit the amount of CPU and memory a container can consume and this is exposed in Kubernetes as limits that you can set.

Read More

Stateful Workloads on Kubernetes: (Almost) Everything You Need to Know

Mike Jochimsen Leave a comment

Kubernetes is great for running stateless workloads, like web servers. It’ll run health checks, restart containers when they crash, and do all sorts of other wonderful things. So, what about stateful workloads? Large implementers like Uber say to avoid it if you can [1], and gurus like Kelsey Hightower echo that sentiment [2].

It’s the topic we’ll address on August 20th at our live SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webcast “Kubernetes in the Cloud (Part 3): Stateful Workloads.”  In this session, we’ll explore when it’s appropriate to run a stateful workload in cluster, or out. We’ll discuss the best options for running a workload like a database on the cloud, or in the cluster, and what’s needed to set that up.

We’ll cover:

Read More

Get Ready for Part 2 of Kubernetes in the Cloud

Michelle Tidwell Leave a comment
Michelle Tidwell, SNIA Board of Directors

As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. In addition to decisions surrounding what technologies to use, they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. Storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in week, days or hours but in minutes.

Read More