High Performance NVMe Storage Is Perfect for MicroService Architecture

There are many Kubernetes storage providers in the market, and to find the right one, you need to understand what you should go for. Kubernetes is the preeminent container orchestration platform and is useful in the development and deployment of applications with the microservice architecture.

The right storage solution for a microservice architecture implemented through containers should be scalable enough for stateful applications. It should also provide high speed and performance in addition to reliability.

Traditional storage solutions are not the answer. They come with a bevy of performance and scalability problems as we will see below. Instead, a solution that enables infrastructure architects to leverage intelligent software and state-of-the-art flash storage is the way to go.

A Micro-Service Architecture Makes Businesses More Competitive 

Traditional storage architecture wasn’t designed for microservices yet more teams are favoring a microservice approach to deployment.

Breaking down a monolithic application into microservices has many benefits. One of the major ones is the ability to upgrade a microservice without affecting other parts of the application. This makes upgrades faster and more cost-efficient.

Another key benefit of a microservices architecture is that it boosts innovation. As opposed to centralized release coordination, microservices enable the engineering teams responsible for different services to make independent decisions and focus on continuous delivery and improvement.

There are many other benefits to microservices, including improved scalability, more resilient applications, faster time-to-market, and improved business agility.

Using Microservices on Traditional Storage Solutions is Limiting 

When microservices first came into the picture, they were stateless. They didn’t need to generate and store new data to handle client requests. However, with time, data from microservices was needed for analytics, including for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

With microservices generating data, storage problems arose. Organizations could have hundreds or thousands of microservices generating data. Yet traditional block storage was not designed to be quickly mapped to and then detached from data sources. This became a problem from the viewpoint of performance and reliability.

There were other problems. With containers that could have a lifetime of seconds, it was difficult for monitoring tools to generate reliable audit logs. It thus became a problem to prove that the storage, encryption, and use of data was in compliance with regulations.

There were also problems with backup and data recovery as most archiving tools were suited for virtual machines, not containers.

High-Performance NVMe Provides Scalable and Persistent Storage for Containers 

Traditional storage, when used with containers, resulted in a range of constraints for performance, flexibility, and scalability.

Container storage needs to be fast, with speeds similar to those of local flash. But it also needs the flexibility and data protection provided by centralized storage. To satisfy both sets of requirements, storage architects have been relying on proprietary, hardware-based storage solutions.

However, there is a better way.

Pooled, redundant, high performance NVMe storage can be used to provide persistent, low-latency container storage for microservice architectures. There are already a number of Kubernetes storage providers offering such solutions.

High performance NVMe storage for Kubernetes comes with multiple advantages. It enables the speed and performance of local flash storage. In addition, it provides a storage solution that is not only scalable enough for stateful applications but also offers protection against drive or host failure.

The Advantages of High-Performance Storage for Containers

Local Speeds and Latencies 

NVMe storage features a distributed block layer that allows the utilization of pooled storage across the devices in a network. This allows local speeds and latencies at the network level. Containers can enjoy significantly improved throughput, IOPS, and latency.

Central Administration 

This software-defined-networking solution creates arbitrary, dynamic, virtual volumes that can be used by any host running the software. These volumes can be mirrored or stripped. At the same time, they are monitored and managed centrally.

Freedom in Architectural Design 

Since this solution relies on a virtual, distributed, non-volatile array, it can be used both with disaggregated and converged design, giving businesses full freedom in architectural design.

Improved Scale and Performance 

Businesses can leverage the full performance of NVMe storage at the network level, and at any scale. In addition to persistent storage that scales, businesses also benefit from predictable application performance.

Performance and capacity can also be scaled linearly.

Efficiency 

Since this is a software-defined solution, the hardware used can be from any vendor. It also allows the maximum utilization of the NVMe flash devices available to a business. In addition, it’s easier to balance CPU and storage resources and the ease of management and monitoring reduces the total cost of ownership.

Flexibility 

Though the containers in a pod have access to the persistent storage availed to that pod, they have the freedom to restart the pod on another host.

The architecture can also be converged, disaggregated, or mixed and different storage media types can be used together to optimize for performance, scale, and cost.