The invention of Kubernetes was done to solve a huge problem which is infrastructure and to make systems infrastructure agnostic. Kubernetes treats infrastructure as a code and makes it entirely automated be it the hardware or the software elements of the application.
Kubernetes derives maximum values by considering the components as fragments of data and further orchestrates them. The containerized system includes everything in it from data to applications and also infrastructure.
In this modern technology-led world, applications can be formless and containerized. Still, that physical data has to be stored somewhere. That is object storage and that object storage needs to operate in the container. If this mechanism is used, Kubernetes can manage the automation of the infrastructure efficiently. On the other hand, if the object storage is deployed in a physical metal-based system or on cloud storage services then the benefits that can be availed from Kubernetes orchestration-based setup cannot be availed.
If one only uses Kubernetes for the applications, one can harness only a minuscule amount of the value that Kubernetes can offer. In the modern computing system, hardware objects need to be abstracted by Kubernetes. They have to be reduced to a certain extent so that applications and data stores can run as containers irrespective of place or time. In particular, the data stores include important services such as databases, message pop-ups, and many more.
Kubernetes looks at object storage similar to other value stores and general databases. Based on the operation then the storage layer is modified to either physical or virtual systems. Often to run high scale unorganized data, cloud-based systems are used by facilitating Kubernetes container. If one doesn’t adhere to it and leaves essential services to external physical appliances or the public cloud, it can take away the benefits of Kubernetes automation.
VMware, a predecessor of Kubernetes in the past, announced the reason they built the Data Persistence platform which they considered an excellent resource. This system has been the answer to the question, of whether to allow modern applications to do what they do best, but also provide the ease of use and facilitate operations of the VMware platform to the technicians.
Applications these days are built to run on Kubernetes. Basis the foundation of Kubernetes these applications can facilitate availability, duplication of data, containerization, and encrypting within themselves to become completely independent of the infrastructure. With respect to storage, it requires to operate in the container in order to enable Data allotment, smooth functioning of Operations, and efficiently managing system failure.
In the past, applications were highly dependent on databases to store and work with structured data, and storage, such as drives or distributed file systems, to store all of the unstructured and even semi-structured data. However, the rapid influx of unstructured data challenged this model. Then the developers quickly learned, these traditional storage and management systems were highly costly and unable to allow the application to perform at scale. Further, it was confined to the data centers that limited access across regions and continents.
This in turn led to object storage, which is designed for highly functional APIs (Application Performing Interfaces). It also additionally led to applications lay of any burden to handle local storage, making them effectively stateless. Modern applications are built on these two functionalities. Well-designed modern applications that deal with some kind of unstructured data, often base themselves on these API-based cloud-native designs by saving any kind of state to a relevant storage system.
Kubernetes-based containerized systems can have application workers grow and shrink based on the workload. They can move to a new node as soon as a current node slows down. This is why object storage has replaced them as the primary storage class that compliments the Kubernetes ability and smoothly facilitates and manages data be it on the ground or in a cloud-native application.
Thus, it would not be apt to say that storage applications, that is databases, object stores, key-value stores, must be stateless. On the flip side, they need to be stateful but it shouldn’t be the case where the application should also be stateful. It is when Kubernetes and Object Storage systems come in handy to balance both the aspects and effectively deliver applications capable of performing calculations, analyzing, and delivering data output effortlessly.
