The document discusses the benefits of containerized storage for Kubernetes applications, emphasizing its scalability, resilience, and ease of use without requiring specialized skills. It highlights the features of OpenEBS, a software-defined storage solution, which enables dynamic provisioning and high availability while addressing persistent storage challenges. Additionally, it details the setup and configuration process for integrating OpenEBS within Kubernetes environments.

1. Containerized Storage for Containers
Kubernetes LA Meetup
July 18, 2017
@OpenEBS
Evan Powell - @epowell101

2. Who?
Team of storage and DevOps engineers with
a 5 year track record of delivering
containerized storage (built on jails) to NTT,
eSilicon, TCS and other service providers.
CloudByte is the pre-existing SDS brand.
Evan Powell, CEO
Director of Ops & BD who started founding
companies back in 2000 and is still at it. Also
an investor and advisor and friend to
enterprise focused entrepreneurs.
Joined as CloudByte / Open EBS CEO 7/1/17

3. What if storage for
container native
applications was itself
container native?

4. ✓ Intent inherited
✓ Scale w/o bottlenecks
✓ No special skills needed ✓ Granularity
✓ Resiliency ✓ Inate multitenancy
✓ Multi-cloud portability ✓ Smaller “blast radius”

5. Manifests express
intent
K8S used with special care for apps requiring persistence
because they require brittle tight coupling.
Hard wired connections via plug-in
“IO Blender”
Container 1
(Node1)
Container 2
(Node 2)
Container 3
(Node 3)
stateless stateful
Stateful still too difficult
Container 1 Container 2 Container 3
Container 1 Container 2 Container 3
NAS SAN S3 NAS Cloud
Any Server, Any Cloud

6. Manifests express
intent
stateless
✓ Intent inherited
Container 1 Container 2 Container 3
Container 1 Container 2 Container 3
Container 1 Container 2 Container 3
stateful
No changes to DevOps workflow even for containers requiring
persistence. Users manifest their intent and the storage and
storage controllers adjust automatically as needed.
Data Container Data Container Data Container
Containerized storage for containers
Any Server, Any Cloud Any Server, Any Cloud

7. ✓ Same workflow, same tools, same experts
Volumes
Provisioners
PVC/PV
StorageClasses
Attach/Detach
Controllers
CNCF/CSI
Container 1 Container 2 Container 3
Data Container Data Container Data Container
stateful
Containerized storage for containers
Dynamic Provisioning
High Availability
Data Protection
Storage Silos, Kubernetes
Managed
Vendor Lock-in, Cross cloud
Slow Upgrades, Seamless
Upgrades
Monolithic!, Microservices
Any Server, Any Cloud

8. Storage Orchestration - K8s Vs OpenEBS
Functionality K8s OpenEBS
Volume Life-cycle - provisioning, attaching/detach, de-provisioning X
Monitoring the volume data X
Scheduling the volume provisioning intelligently X
Smart space management X
Availability of volume X
Application aware backup/snapshots X
QoS guarantee (latency guarantee) X
Smart movement of the volumes across racks and regions X
Cataloging of storage requirements for different applications X
K8s takes care of connecting applications to stateful storage. OpenEBS answers the other persistent storage questions

9. Storage just fades away as a concern

10. How is OpenEBS built ?
Storage containerization
Storage orchestration
Deep storage operations
Core Storage features
is built using
is integrated with
is built into (OpenEBS “Maya”)
is built into (OpenEBS)
(Control plane)
Smart Capacity Management
Volume Latency Monitoring and Auto-healing
Adapt to varying workloads - Application Aware Storage (Pods)
AWS EBS Like APIs
Storage Analytics
(Data Plane)
Containerized volumes
Thin and scalable block storage
Enterprise HA
Intelligent QoS
Smart Tiering for higher performance

11. Why move the data & configs next to the app?
Today’s scale out storage systems are almost infinitely configurable. Matching their configurations to
static workloads is difficult. In a world of dynamic, ever evolving workloads due to micro-services and
multi-cloud deployments, it is not a tractable problem for humans.
Let’s say you want to benchmark for your workload:
Source: Alex Aizman’s blog: https://storagetarget.com/author/alexaizman/

12. Why move the data & configs next to the app?
Today’s scale out storage systems are almost infinitely configurable. Matching their configurations to
static workloads is difficult. In a world of dynamic, ever evolving workloads due to micro services and
multi-cloud deployments, it is not a tractable problem for humans.
Let’s say you want to benchmark for your workload:
Duration of run ~6,700 years
Source: Alex Aizman’s blog: https://storagetarget.com/author/alexaizman/

13. More benefits of Cloud Native approach
OpenEBS always available multi-cloud block services are delivered via containerized microservices
Granularity: Each pod has its own block protocol stack, tiering engine, QoS engine and more. SLAs per POD.
Performance & efficiency: access patterns maintained per-volume. Hot-data on NVMe-Flash or on 3DX-Memory.
Cold-data on slower disks / SAN/ Cloud-Storage/S3.
Scalability: Metadata based on “size of the volume” & not on “number of volumes”. Can reduce metadata traversal 100x.
Blast radius: Eliminates risk of scale out storage system corruption.
And much, much more such as cost savings due to resource efficiency, innate multitenancy, and cross cloud portability
The Conway’s Law benefits might be the most important - innovation unlocked
✓
✓
✓
✓

14. ✓ Scalbility - no metadata bottleneck
Global Metadata at a system level
Logical
volumes
Lun
Application
Metadata is managed at
block level
IO Blocks
IO Blocks
100TB
Raw
8 TB
Meta
100TB
Raw
XFS Meta data XFS Meta data2 TB
Meta
2 TB
Meta
Logical
Volumes in XFS files
Volume
meta
Lun
Application
IO Blocks
IO Chunks
Metadata of the volume is
managed at chunk level
100 GB
Meta
The volume IO processing has to
deal with the global metadata of
8TB
The volume IO processing has to
deal with the volume metadata of
100GB

16. Cluster Admin - Enabling OpenEBS on K8s
K8s master K8s minions
Step 1: Use can existing K8s Cluster or Launch a new Cluster
(locally or in your fav cloud provider or use stackpoint.io to
create a cluster.)
Step 2: Configure OpenEBS on K8s.
kubectl apply -f openebs-operator.yaml
Step 3: Configure or Customize OpenEBS
kubectl apply -f openebs-config.yaml
kubectl apply -f openebs-storageclasses.yaml
https://github.com/openebs/openebs/tree/master/k8s

17. Developer - Using OpenEBS PVs
Step 1: Checkout the StorageClasses available
kubectl get sc
Step 2: Modify the Application YAML to use the openebs
storage class.
kubectl apply -f demo-jupyter-openebs.yaml
https://github.com/openebs/openebs/blob/master/k8s/demo/jupyter/demo-jupyter-openebs.yaml
K8s master K8s minions
Step 3: Launch Jupyter UI
http://<external-ip>:<port>/

18. Admin’s interaction with OpenEBS
K8s master K8s minions
Storage classes
Central Repo
Install OpenEBS
kubectl apply -f openebs-operator.yaml
kubectl apply -f openebs-storageclasses.yaml
kubectl apply -f openebs-config.yaml
1
2
3

19. Developer’s interaction with OpenEBS
K8s master K8s minions
- Data science developer
- Wants to set up a jupyter notebook (not an expert in storage)
1
kubectl apply -f demo-jupyter-openebs.yaml
2
- Configure the jupyter yaml file for
all the jupyter functionality
- Read the available OpenEBS
storage classes and choose one
- Launch the jupyter application
kubectl get sc

20. In short….
Pod 1
OR
Pod 1VS
Cloud Native Cloud Washing

21. Q&A
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community
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@openebs

22. What do you think?
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community
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Slack.openebs.io
blog.openebs.io
@openebs

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