A clear trend that is emerging in the future of stateful containers is the option to run the entire storage stack as part of the container orchestration framework. Minio and Quartermaster are two offerings that help achieve a fully containerized storage stack.
Talk 1: Object Storage in a Cloud Native Container Environment
This talk looked at the modern application stack whereby a cloud native application is split into both stateless and stateful containers. Whereas the (many) stateless containers allow for easy and dynamic scalability, the stateful containers manage the application state. Depending on the nature of the persistent data different technologies are best suited to address them. For large data/blobs object storage has emerged as the preferred way to handle these in a scalable manner.
About the presenter: Frank Wessels is an entrepreneur in the IT industry. He started in 1993 in ISG Technologies as a developer for medical systems in Torronto, Canada, but since 1992, he participated as a co-founder and chief architect in a business aimed at the development of a PACS system for radiologists. Frank remained in the healthcare industry until 2013 as the founder of another company called 3mensio Medical Imaging that focused on doing 3D visualisation using GPU technology. Since 2014 he switched to Cloud Computing in co-founding a company that built a new product for transferring content over the internet. Lately he has focused on Golang as well as gotten involved in object storage via a new startup company called Minio (@minio).
Talk 2: Project Quartermaster
The deployment and management of distributed storage systems is not only complicated, but also quite different across different storage systems. Although some distributed storage systems have their own deployment tools, they are based on a bare metal or virtual machine model and do not integrate easily with Kubernetes. This talk introduced Quartermaster, a framework for managing containerized storage systems like Ceph, GlusterFS, NFS-Ganesha, Rook and others on top of Kubernetes. Quartermaster enables the deployment, installation, and integration of these type of storage systems onto a Kubernetes cluster. Quartermaster abstracts this complexity and presents the client with a simple storage deployment model which is fully integrated with Kubernetes. By simplifying the deployment of storage systems, Quartermaster makes it possible to easily and reliably deploy, upgrade, and get status of a desired storage system in a Kubernetes cluster
About the presenter: Luis Pabón (@_lpabon_) is a software engineer at CoreOS. Prior to joining CoreOS in November of 2016, he worked at Red Hat Storage, NetApp Advanced Technology Group, and at EMC on various storage products.
The recording of the livestream is archived on the VMware Technology Network Facebook page. Talk 1 starts right at the beginning. Talk 2 starts around the [00:50:30] mark.
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