New Ebook: The New Stack’s Quick Guide to Cloud Native Storage
The New Stack today is releasing its latest ebook, “The State of State: New Approaches to Cloud Native Storage.” This quick guide is shorter than previous TNS ebooks and presents our perspective, informed by original reporting and analysis, on how the cloud is changing the storage landscape.
Managing state in enterprise applications has changed with cloud computing and container architectures. It previously meant storing data in databases that were installed on hardware and managed to run stateful applications that were often governed by strict service- level agreements (SLAs). Enterprises had figured out how to handle state in an on-premises world. The challenge comes in the move to the cloud when many companies continue handling state in essentially the same way they used to on monoliths — at least until they learn the hard way not to do so.
To understand where we are now when it comes to managing state in cloud native applications, The New Stack published a series of feature articles comparing how cloud native storage vendors, traditional storage vendors and cloud service providers approach issues of state and storage in cloud native architectures.
We have since rounded out the reporting with an overview on “the state of state” and edited the series into a comprehensive ebook on cloud native storage, sponsored by NetApp. We aim to help developers and DevOps understand the differences and options they have, for storage in cloud native applications.
In this 48-page quick guide to cloud native storage, you’ll learn about:
- How best to connect cloud native apps to storage.
- How Kubernetes works with storage.
- Differences between cloud native storage vendors, traditional storage vendors and the big-three cloud providers.
- DevOps considerations for provisioning and managing storage.
Cloud Native vs. Traditional vs. Cloud Service
It’s important to remember some key facts: Containers were designed to be stateless. Kubernetes was designed to orchestrate stateless, ephemeral, immutable containers. At first, any state that these applications needed was just stored externally in silo’ed storage devices and accessed with volume plugins.
But as companies start seeing how Kubernetes and containerized architectures can increase application agility and speed, there’s been an increasing push to package more and more applications in containers, and to use Kubernetes to manage both compute and storage resources.
State can now be handled inside of stateful containers via storage services or through different kinds of storage systems.
This quick guide explains the differences between container-attached, software-defined storage, cloud storage provided by traditional storage hardware vendors and the native options from cloud service providers. In many cases, enterprises will build a strategy for running stateful applications in containers using options from at least two, and often all three, categories. Download “The State of State: New Approaches to Cloud Native Storage” to learn more.
