Given that applications and their stateful data are inseparable, organizations must implement data protection solutions for applications running on Kubernetes to safeguard against losing that data. These solutions go beyond traditional backup and recovery, leveraging incremental snapshot technologies and policy-based management. They also support disaster recovery workflows, ransomware and other cyberthreat protection, data integrity features, and–increasingly–data copy and migration management to aid in copying data across a multicloud landscape.

Data protection solutions for Kubernetes-based workloads are essential for any organization running applications with valuable stateful data on Kubernetes-based platforms. These solutions are typically deployed and managed by central IT teams responsible for an application’s RTO and RPO. However, some solutions take a more distributed approach, with developers and application operators as their target audience.

As Kubernetes matures as a platform to run applications, so too do data protection solutions. In years past, many solutions focused on supporting just Kubernetes. Today, Kubernetes is just one of many source platforms that modern data protection solutions support. Customers now expect solutions to provide comprehensive protection regardless of where or how applications are run, or the cause of data loss.

This shift has driven data protection solutions to support a broad range of environments, including bare metal, virtualization, and Kubernetes on both on-premises infrastructure and cloud platforms. They also extend support to specific SaaS services, databases, and other critical workloads. These solutions have a mature feature set that offers some combination of backup/recovery, disaster recovery, data copy management, ransomware, and other cyberthreat protection, and enterprise features for compliance and auditing. In fact, as the market and its solutions mature, the distinctions between data protection, cybersecurity, business continuity, and data copy and migration management are becoming increasingly blurred.

This is our fifth year evaluating the Kubernetes data protection space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines five of the top Kubernetes data protection solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading Kubernetes data protection offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

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A common pattern in adopting persistent storage solutions for Kubernetes is the reuse of existing enterprise storage solutions. This reuse is considered a safe bet for the first couple of deployments, but it isn’t a structural solution in some cases. Compared to other types of storage systems, Kubernetes-native storage offers a more DevOps-friendly environment, helping to build a hardware stack that can be controlled by the operations team while enabling developers to allocate and monitor resources quickly when necessary. This is a major boon for enterprise IT organizations looking for the smartest way to evolve their processes and align them with the latest business and technology requirements.

Organizations can now consider more factors than ever before when choosing where their applications and data should run—and they want the freedom to decide where that should be. The public cloud is known for its flexibility and agility, but on-premises infrastructures are still better in terms of efficiency, cost, and reliability.

With widespread adoption across cloud, edge, and on-premises facilities, Kubernetes is instrumental in executing the vision of portable, flexible, and agile hybrid cloud strategies, making applications and their data portable and cloud-agnostic—for the most part. It needs the right integration with infrastructure layers—such as storage—to complement its still-maturing native support for stateful data storage. Additionally, it remains a significant task to select and implement a Kubernetes storage solution for persistent data that makes the most of Kubernetes’s application mobility and data portability capabilities.

With Kubernetes now supporting business-critical applications and services, requirements have become more stringent. Scalability, performance, resilience, security, and other nonfunctional requirements are the order of the day, and Kubernetes must do it all to ensure a consistent level of throughput without service disruptions. These requirements drive the demand for enterprise-class stateful data services, solid security controls, mature multitenant performance management—like quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth throttling—and thorough alerting, reporting, and monitoring. Lastly, enterprises do not want to be locked into any single vendor’s ecosystem as they reap the benefits of Kubernetes’s portability and cloud-agnostic potential, so they’re looking for a storage solution that works with feature parity across on-premises and cloud infrastructures.

This is our fifth year evaluating the Kubernetes data storage space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. For this evaluation, there will be one GigaOm Key Criteria report and one GigaOm Radar report, whereas last year we evaluated enterprise and cloud-native Kubernetes data storage separately. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 9 of the top Kubernetes data storage solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading Kubernetes data storage offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

The post GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Storage appeared first on Gigaom.

With its widespread adoption across cloud, edge, and on-premises infrastructure, Kubernetes is instrumental in executing the vision of portable, flexible, and agile hybrid cloud strategies, making applications and their data both portable and cloud-agnostic—for the most part. It still needs the right integration with infrastructure layers, such as storage, to complement its still maturing native support for stateful data storage.

While organizations have discovered the ease of operation that the ubiquitous availability of Kubernetes APIs brings, they have also learned that infrastructure dependencies like storage are still a major consideration for full-blown production deployments with mission-critical applications, especially in multicloud scenarios. The architecture of the control plane and specific scenarios of how and where it can be deployed are determining factors in how well a storage platform can be integrated into these infrastructure environments.

It’s still a significant task to select and implement a Kubernetes storage solution for persistent data that makes the most of its application mobility and data portability potential. Spurred by the rising popularity of cloud computing and containerized applications, developers are increasingly discovering the value and operational simplicity of integrating storage capabilities into Kubernetes seamlessly. However, in some cases, the storage solution you already have for other workloads is the best storage solution to get started with for Kubernetes.

This report discusses storage solutions that have a native integration into Kubernetes through the container storage interface (CSI) and other means. GigaOm recognizes the various storage architectures and breadth of storage usage across various runtime platforms, including cloud-based virtualization, on-premises virtualization (VMware, KubeVirt, and others), and bare metal, and it recognizes that many organizations do not buy storage solutions specifically for their Kubernetes estate but rather reuse existing storage solutions that continue to also serve non-Kubernetes platforms simultaneously, leading to a complex landscape of how and where storage is used. Hence, in this report, we cover both more traditional enterprise storage array solutions that support Kubernetes and more Kubernetes-native solutions that are co-located on the Kubernetes cluster nodes in hyperconverged architectures. For each solution, we’ll note which deployment model is involved.

Business Imperative
As storage vendors continue to work on adding native Kubernetes support, finding the right solution to fit your requirements remains a non-trivial task. This is a challenge because vendors must support a common data storage layer that abstracts physical and cloud resources with a standard set of features and services for data protection, security, and enterprise data management (as shown in Figure 1).

Figure 1. Data Storage for Kubernetes

With Kubernetes now supporting business-critical applications and services, requirements become more stringent. Scalability, performance, resilience, security, and other nonfunctional requirements are the order of the day, and Kubernetes must do it all to ensure a consistent level of throughput without service disruptions. These requirements drive the demand for enterprise-class stateful data services, solid security controls, mature multitenant performance management—like quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth throttling—and thorough alerting, reporting, and monitoring.

Lastly, enterprises do not want to be locked into any single vendor’s ecosystem as they reap the benefits of Kubernetes’ portable and agnostic promise, and they look for a storage solution that works with feature parity across on-premises and cloud infrastructures, requiring flexibility on the solution’s part as it’s deployed across various cloud and on-premises environments.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a Kubernetes storage solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a Kubernetes storage solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 2) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a Kubernetes storage solution is a very credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for Kubernetes storage are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.