Building a Storage Cluster with Kubernetes [I]

Modern software storage systems are inherently complex. They are composed of numerous distributed components, require careful balancing of resources, and have stringent performance requirements. If yo …

Modern software storage systems are inherently complex. They are composed of numerous distributed components, require careful balancing of resources, and have stringent performance requirements. If you’re running your applications in a public cloud you’re typically shielded from this complexity and can utilize managed storage services like EBS, S3 and EFS. If you’re running on-premise, however, your choices are quite limited and typically result in using traditional big-iron storage systems. In this talk we’ll walkthrough how we’ve built a production-ready storage cluster using Kubernetes. Storage nodes run as pods and enumerate the available storage devices within the cluster. We’ll explore how to optimize the network through CNI plugins to separate client and storage cluster traffic. We’ll show how some of the features of Kubernetes including controllers/operators, third-party resources, resource management, and rolling upgrades can lead to more powerful and resilient storage clusters. We’ll also walk through use cases where the storage cluster is dedicated (hyperscaled) or shared with other applications (hyperconverged).