GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Storagev5.0

Persistent Storage Solutions for Kubernetes-Based Applications

Table of Contents

  1. Executive Summary
  2. Market Categories and Deployment Types
  3. Decision Criteria Comparison
  4. GigaOm Radar
  5. Solution Insights
  6. Analyst’s Outlook
  7. About Joep Piscaer

1. Executive Summary

The adoption of cloud-native, container-based architectures and modernization of applications continues to fuel demand for persistent storage on Kubernetes platforms. Organizations understand that the benefits of cloud-native workloads in terms of performance, scalability, and portability are key enablers for achieving business goals. Many enterprises already run cloud-native workloads and realize the advantages of more agile and flexible architectures, including application portability that enables frictionless workload movement from the data center to the cloud, and even among clouds. This agility provides greater flexibility and responsiveness to business requirements than using legacy technologies.

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.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.