With the advent of the multi-cloud era, who would dare to use container storage immediately?

Original 2023-06-12 21:54 Big Data Online

In 2011, Gartner put forward the concept of digital transformation; for more than a decade, enterprise digitalization has experienced several transformation trends such as mobility and cloudification, and now it has entered a new era: multi-cloud.

The latest statistics show that 89% of enterprises today choose to build IT systems with a multi-cloud strategy, and 80% of enterprises choose a hybrid cloud architecture; behind the multi-cloud trend, several technical buzzwords frequently appear: containers, agile, and microservices.

The mainstream view is that multi-cloud and container technologies will not only bring about further changes in IT systems, but also bring about further changes in enterprise organizational structures. Putting aside all the lofty and obscure languages, let us look directly at how multi-cloud and container technology itself can change enterprises, and discuss how enterprises should build multi-cloud-oriented infrastructure.

Multi-cloud greatly enhances the elasticity and resilience of enterprises, and containers become the best strategic support point

When every enterprise uses cloud technology as its IT base, it will face a choice: public cloud or private cloud? By choosing a public cloud, enterprises can go online quickly without building complex data centers, and the cost of procurement is calculated according to usage, so the cost of trial and error is very low when the business starts; choosing a private cloud has cost advantages after the infrastructure scale expands , and the data is stored locally, with better security and privacy.

In order to take into account the advantages of both, enterprise IT facilities adopting a multi-cloud strategy often include both public cloud and private cloud, and the choice of public cloud often includes multiple vendors.

Where is the magic of cloudy? It is generally believed that enterprises choose a multi-cloud strategy for the following four reasons:

Complementary advantages: use the elastic expansion capability of the public cloud to meet the demand elasticity of Internet services, and use the private cloud to optimize the privacy protection of key services. In addition, the public cloud has become a new way for data disaster recovery and long-term data storage.
Global strategy implementation: For manufacturers with multinational or even cross-state business, public cloud can help enterprises quickly deploy and conduct business in various regions of the world, while private cloud can help enterprises retain data in accordance with regional compliance requirements.
Optimum cost: For new technologies and services, low-cost and fast trial and error are carried out through the public cloud; when the business matures and scales, it is transferred to the private cloud to reduce operating costs.
Improve enterprise resilience: Cloud services, especially public cloud services, are often sold in full-stack and are likely to be bundled by a single vendor. Enterprises will lose supply resilience and bargaining power. Choosing multi-cloud can avoid this problem to a certain extent.

In general, a multi-cloud strategy can greatly enhance the flexibility and resilience of an enterprise's IT system, making it more adaptable to a world of increasing uncertainty.

The multi-cloud strategy looks beautiful, but it is difficult to implement. Due to the fierce competition among cloud vendors, there are barriers between multi-clouds, and applications cannot be migrated to each other due to different operating environments. Multi-clouds have actually become IT islands.

One can imagine how difficult it is for an enterprise to migrate software developed on a private cloud to run on a public cloud; not to mention switching the business to another cloud for disaster recovery when a public cloud goes down. However, container technology makes this possible.

The container technology, like the virtual machine technology that has been popular all over the world for more than 20 years, divides the resources of one device and virtualizes them into multiple devices to make full use of resources; however, the container reuses all the resources below the host operating system. resources, making it lighter than virtual machines and occupying fewer resources.

A simple comparison, a server can be virtualized as 5-20 virtual machines, but it can be virtualized as hundreds or thousands of containers; the startup time of a virtual machine may be several minutes to tens of minutes, while the container only It takes a few seconds. It is precisely because of this lightweight feature of the container that it can be expanded rapidly to meet the business flood that appears at any time.

The above advantages are just the tip of the iceberg of container technology. In fact, containers are considered the best support for a multi-cloud strategy for two reasons:

Containers are the best way for users to build clouds locally. Building a cloud locally, that is, a private cloud, can combine the serviceability of the cloud with the privacy of the local data center, and has become the choice of many enterprises for IT construction. The container platform is the best way to realize local cloud building. By building a private cloud through a container platform such as Kubernetes, developers can focus on software development without paying attention to the details of business deployment, which will be automated by the container platform. Combining the capability of containers with cloud management software (such as OpenStack) can easily create a serviceable private cloud platform.
Containers are portable across clouds. The software developed and run on the container platform of cloud A can be packaged as an image file and transferred to cloud B. The container platform on cloud B can be directly installed and run without the need for developers to pre-install and debug the environment. This deeply solves the problem of application migration between multiple clouds, and enables multiple clouds to truly serve the strategic purpose of enterprises to improve IT elasticity and resilience.

Because container technology has such great significance, all walks of life, from the edge to the core business, have started a wave of container transformation to welcome the arrival of the multi-cloud era.

Much-anticipated but fatal flaws, professional storage makes up for technical gaps

Although the container has so many technical advantages, in fact its capabilities have not yet been fully demonstrated. Currently, Kubernetes, the most common container platform in the industry, is actually a product operated by the open source community.

Since development is not driven by business, most open source software has a common problem: it cannot meet the requirements of enterprise-level applications, such as stability and maintainability, and Kubernetes is also unavoidable. Although Kubernetes has aroused heated discussions in the industry, its fatal flaw of insufficient operational stability has caused many difficulties in its implementation in enterprise IT systems.

The lightweight of container technology comes at the cost of a large number of resource isolation and environment isolation, which also determines that its stability is hard to match that of virtual machines. Due to the lack of necessary resource isolation between host systems, whenever a large number of containers run at the same time, resources may be occupied by each other, causing some containers to stop running due to insufficient resources; in addition, other problems on the host may also affect the container. stability.

Unfortunately, compared to the VMWare platform, which has introduced a variety of disaster recovery software such as vSphere Software Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication, and features to enhance the reliability of virtual machines, container platforms such as Kubernetes have not yet launched corresponding functions to optimize container stability, so there are few customers. Dare to use the container platform as the core business PaaS layer infrastructure.

Although Kubernetes itself has not solved the problem, CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation, also the main operator of Kubernetes) is actively turning its attention to professional storage, hoping to make up for it through the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of professional storage. Gaps in container platform-related capabilities.

Therefore, the Kubernetes v1.13 version launched a heavyweight plug-in - Container Storage Interface (CSI, container storage interface). Through CSI, containers can easily use external storage to connect to container applications and save data to highly reliable external storage. , and set snapshots, clones, etc. to protect data. In this way, even if the container crashes due to various reasons, the data can be preserved intact, and the original data can be accessed after the container application is restored, avoiding unforeseen consequences caused by data loss.

The emergence of CSI has determined that the storage-computing separation architecture has become an officially recognized container standard architecture, and it also makes professional storage one of the best choices for container data bases.

Enterprise core container platform construction, why NAS is the answer

With the gradual maturity of container technology, more and more enterprise applications are moving towards containerization. One of the most iconic events was in 2016, when Gartner, a well-known analyst firm, put forward the theory of dividing enterprise business into steady-state and sensitive-state "dual-mode cores". Today, cloud-native transformation has already moved from access channels, R&D testing, and office production to key transaction businesses; the construction of "new distributed core" and "sensitive core" has been widely carried out in industries such as finance and operators. At this time, building a core-level container platform for an enterprise should be the key focus of enterprises in transition.

What is the core? Extreme business continuity, superb performance, and strong manageability are necessary conditions for the core system. The "sensitive core" is no exception, but its capability requirements should also include the flexibility and automation capabilities required by sensitive business, which is more difficult to build than the traditional core. To meet the core requirements of the current container platform, there are still the following problems to be solved urgently:

Insufficient fault recovery capability: When a container runs stateful applications, such as database applications, the container platform cannot automatically recover from node, storage, or site failures, which poses hidden dangers to the availability of key applications;
Data consistency is difficult to guarantee: most of the applications deployed in containers are distributed architectures, and there is a risk of data consistency, and the container platform has not yet provided any solution;
Insufficient storage agility: Most container applications have been transformed by microservices and are composed of dozens of small applications carried by containers. The startup of an application means the startup of dozens of containers at the same time, and the corresponding storage resources need to be provisioned synchronously. At present, most of the batch provisioning capabilities of storage resources cannot meet the requirements of containers. In addition, for stateful applications, container expansion needs to be synchronized with persistent data, but data synchronization will reduce the agility of expansion.

In actual use, the container platform still faces many challenges, which need to be solved one by one. As a manufacturer that has extensively participated in the construction of enterprise core business platforms, Huawei Storage has gradually worked out a storage construction solution for core-level container platforms through extensive project cooperation with customers and partners - NAS (network-attached storage, also known as file sharing storage) Container storage solution for the base.

As a file storage protocol that has been born for 40 years, NAS continues to burst into vitality with its open interface, easy-to-use functions, and wide platform compatibility. In the new era of cloud native, why is NAS once again in charge as the best base? There are three main reasons:

Ease of use and versatility: Simplicity is one of the main reasons for the popularity of container platforms. NAS storage resources are easy to use and can be used directly by mounting them; NAS has the functions necessary for cloud services such as multi-tenancy, quota, and QoS, and does not require repeated construction to avoid increasing system complexity; in addition, NAS has anti-ransomware, anti-virus, and log audit functions. And other security compliance functions are also crucial today when data security risks are soaring. NAS can greatly reduce the difficulty of building and maintaining container platforms, allowing enterprises to focus on function realization, which is one of the original intentions of enterprise cloud transformation.
Data sharing, widely compatible: Unlike SAN/block storage, NAS naturally supports multiple servers to share and access the same data. At the same time, except for databases, most container applications require data sharing. For example, web applications require multiple servers to share web page resources, log analysis applications need to share log resources, and continuous integration applications need to share code resources. In addition, except for a few mainstream commercial software such as Oracle and VMware, few applications can actively manage SAN storage resources, while NAS is compatible with almost all application types. The above two points enable NAS to meet the requirements of most container applications.
Stable operation and fast fault tolerance: Containers have an important fault tolerance feature called container drift, that is, a container application running on a certain server can be transferred to another healthy server to continue running after the server is damaged. The prerequisite for successful drift is that the two servers have the same data, otherwise, access inconsistency will occur after the container application drifts. When using storage resources that cannot be shared, the drifting feature of the container will either not be able to play (for example, when using a server local disk, because the data between the two servers is difficult to maintain, the container is generally not allowed to drift), or the drift is very slow and the recovery time is long (For example, when using SAN storage, the volume can follow the container to reconnect to another server, but it takes 7 minutes to release the mapping relationship with the original server), which will seriously affect the reliability of the container platform; and NAS supports shared access , not only does not need to consider the issue of data consistency, nor does it need to be mapped one by one with the server, the original data can be accessed after the new server is mounted, and the business recovery time only takes 40 seconds.

According to statistics, 74% of users use NAS as the container base, and NAS has become the most used container storage. Judging from the three reasons analyzed above, this is by no means accidental.

Every IT leader has thought about whether to migrate their business to the cloud. Now whether you are ready or not, the era of multi-cloud has arrived. Fortunately, we don't need to struggle between the elasticity of public cloud and the privacy of local deployment. With the help of containers, we can achieve both—build a localized cloud.

Currently, how to build a core-level container platform is becoming a major research topic for IT leaders. It is hoped that more and more manufacturers, like Huawei Storage, will cooperate extensively with customers and partners, and gradually explore a feasible path through continuous practice, so that container construction will no longer be a problem, and multi-cloud will bring development opportunities and benefits to more enterprises. Business success!