Asserting the final availability of Microsoft Azure Container Storage, the {industry}’s first platform-managed container native storage service within the public cloud.
We’re thrilled to announce the normal availability of Microsoft Azure Container Storage, the {industry}’s first platform-managed container native storage service within the public cloud. With Kubernetes driving cloud evolution, we’re witnessing a transformative shift as enterprises transfer from digital machines (VMs) to containers, optimizing for scalability, flexibility, and price effectivity. We introduce Azure Container Storage to fulfill these calls for, offering greatest at school worth efficiency for internet hosting stateful containers on cloud-based storage and delivering lowest latency on regionally connected storage.
Azure Container Storage joins our suite of container providers, tightly integrating with Kubernetes and simplifying stateful workload administration throughout Azure’s set of complete storage choices. Beforehand, clients wanted to retrofit stateful workloads to VM-centric storage choices with scalability constraints or deploy self-managed open-source container storage options. Since Azure Container Storage is constructed purposefully for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), it simplifies the method, permitting builders to give attention to innovating and working purposes with out worrying about managing storage. With the power to carry out all storage operations immediately by means of Kubernetes APIs—similar to creating persistent volumes and scaling up capability on demand, it eliminates the necessity to work together with management airplane APIs of the underlying infrastructure.
Azure Container Storage additionally streamlines storage administration throughout a number of backing storage choices. With its normal availability, Azure Container Storage helps Ephemeral Disks (native NVMe and temp SSD) and Azure Disks, simply the beginning in our journey to rework the container storage panorama. Ephemeral Disks help marks a pivotal second for container customers, offering the most complete quantity administration help for containers on native storage within the cloud. Past primary persistent quantity (PV) provisioning, Azure Container Storage provides built-in capabilities similar to snapshots and autoscaling, capabilities that can’t be discovered exterior of Azure.
Throughout preview, clients have already begun making the most of Azure Container Storage to evolve their business-critical, next-generation options. Whether or not it’s optimizing Redpanda cluster efficiency on Ephemeral Disks or scaling previous current persistent quantity limits for Postgres workloads on Azure Disks, Azure Container Storage helps a variety of workloads. For constructing stateful purposes working containers, that is only the start. Shortly after normal availability, we’ll increase our choices to incorporate Elastic SAN and later, choices like Azure Blobs and Azure Information for shared storage use circumstances.
A cloud native answer for all use circumstances
Azure Container Storage ensures important resiliency and safety for each workload by means of built-in resiliency design and safety enforcements.
- Constructed-in resiliency: Simply run extremely accessible stateful purposes on Azure Container Storage and shield towards zonal failures on all ranges of the useful resource hierarchy. You’ll be able to select between zone-redundant storage (ZRS) choices or multi-zone storage swimming pools on local-redundant storage (LRS) to ship a extremely accessible answer throughout zones. For native storage, we optimally place a pod’s persistent volumes on ephemeral disks that exist on the identical node because the AKS pod, lowering the variety of failure factors that might impression your utility’s runtime. Furthermore, we provide the perfect steadiness for availability, value, and efficiency—offering probably the most cost-efficient block storage providing on the cloud with multi-zonal excessive availability help and sub millisecond learn latency.
- Safety by default: Safety is our prime precedence. We provide server-side encryption (SSE) with platform-managed keys by default and implement community safety per respective backing storage choices. Clients can additional improve safety by means of in depth choices, similar to SSE with customer-managed keys, per their safety requirements.
Modernizing current purposes
For any enterprise trying to modernize its purposes, Azure Container Storage consolidates administration throughout acquainted block storage choices, simplifies the motion of workloads, and gives continuity in backup and catastrophe restoration.
We streamline and consolidate the administration expertise throughout our complete portfolio of acquainted Azure block storage choices. Relatively than needing to certify and handle a number of container orchestration options for every storage useful resource you deploy, Azure Container Storage effectively coordinates quantity provisioning inside a storage pool, an idea we introduce to group storage assets right into a unified useful resource in your AKS cluster. This storage pool may be backed by your most popular storage possibility, empowering you to decide on probably the most cost-efficient useful resource tailor-made to your particular workload efficiency necessities. For instance, Ephemeral Disk, newly launched as a supported block storage providing for containers, is well-suited for latency-sensitive workloads that profit from native NVMe or temp SSD storage. KPN, a Dutch telecommunications firm, shared their constructive expertise utilizing Azure Container Storage with native NVMe to host a mail answer on AKS:
“With Azure Container Storage, we now have been in a position to obtain improved efficiency in our KPN shopper mail workload by leveraging ephemeral disks and making the most of the pooling of assets that Azure Container Storage allows. As a substitute of the handbook configuration of storage, we will give attention to working our workloads, and Azure Container Storage will care for auto-discovering and formatting the NVMe disks, making it easy to make use of and in keeping with the Kubernetes manner.”
—Peter Teeninga, Cloud Architect, Private Cloud by KPN
To make your journey to the cloud as painless as potential we partnered with CloudCasa, a key participant in Kubernetes knowledge mobility, to simplify mission-critical migration to the cloud. To proceed supporting your cloud property, we partnered with Kasten, the main service for knowledge safety for Kubernetes, providing sturdy backup and catastrophe restoration capabilities. For extra particulars on our knowledge migration and backup expertise supplied by means of our companions, please check with the later part.
Constructing cloud native purposes
For utility builders constructing options within the cloud, Azure Container Storage provides seamless integration with Kubernetes, offering a container-native expertise designed for scalability from the bottom up. This ensures that your purposes can develop simply and cost-efficiently over time. By supporting industry-standard protocols, similar to NVMe-of and iSCSI, we simplify interoperability, offering further efficiency choices. For example, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of the decrease persistent quantity connect and detach latencies these protocols provide and obtain fast scale-out and quick failover. Azure Container Storage permits clients to connect extra storage assets to a single VM, growing the restrict to 75 volumes for any VM sizes. The added flexibility will increase clients’ means to optimize Azure assets to fulfill their value and efficiency targets. Sesam, a Norwegian knowledge synchronization and administration firm, has successfully leveraged this functionality to cut back prices by scaling up their persistent volumes extra effectively:
“Azure Container Storage (ACS) has enabled us to realize decrease complete value of possession in our workload. We now have a lot of pods that want their very own persistent volumes, and thru the usage of Azure Disks and storage pool useful resource pooling, we’re in a position to fulfill this in a less expensive method, with out hitting the boundaries on the variety of disks that may be connected to a node. In follow this makes us in a position to allocate capability extra simply and extra effectively.”
—Geir Ove Grønmo, Product Supervisor, Sesam.io
Knowledge migration and backup help by means of our trusted companions
Extremely environment friendly and operational storage administration is the baseline expertise Azure Container Storage strives for. Azure Container Storage tightly integrates with two key third-party options—CloudCasa and Kasten—to give you an built-in migrate, backup, and catastrophe restoration expertise for workloads hosted on stateful containers.
With the power to routinely recreate a whole cluster, CloudCasa centralizes the administration of cluster restoration and migration, making it straightforward to maneuver your current Kubernetes workloads to and inside AKS. To modernize your current workloads on Azure, merely do a full backup of the prevailing storage assets then arrange a restore, indicating Azure Container Storage as the brand new storage useful resource in your cluster.
“With Azure Container Storage, Microsoft has eliminated a lot of the administration burden from Kubernetes storage, permitting improvement and DevOps groups to give attention to their knowledge and purposes. This strategy allows organizations to extra simply function stateful manufacturing purposes at scale. We’re happy to have labored with the Azure Container Storage workforce to certify CloudCasa for backup and restoration of stateful purposes working on it, and to offer a collectively examined answer for simple migration to it.”
—Bob Adair, Head of Product Administration, CloudCasa By Catalogic
Kasten automates the end-to-end workflow of backup and catastrophe restoration, defending your Kubernetes clusters and utility operations. While you deploy your storage pool in Azure Container Storage, you’ll be able to allow Kasten throughout snapshot setup. Utilizing dynamic insurance policies, Kasten helps you handle backups at scale in a crash-consistent method.
“With Azure Container Storage and Kasten by Veeam, organizations can maximize efficiency, flexibility and resiliency, whereas defending their cloud native workloads from ransomware assaults. Kasten by Veeam collaborated with Microsoft Product and Engineering groups to validate provisioning, quantity snapshot and restore capabilities on Azure Container Storage to make sure joint Microsoft and Kasten by Veeam clients can backup, shield, and migrate their stateful workloads to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). By way of our strategic partnership, we simplify organizations’ cloud journeys with out sacrificing efficiency, scalability or resiliency.”
—Matt Slotten, Principal Resolution Architect, Cloud Native Partnerships Kasten by Veeam
What’s new with normal availability?
Our announcement builds on the updates we’ve shared all through our preview, highlighting a number of differentiated capabilities. We’ve enhanced the resiliency of stateful containers with multi-zone storage swimming pools and quantity replication for native NVMe storage swimming pools to guard towards availability loss throughout single node failures. We’ve additionally added snapshot help throughout all storage choices for backup and catastrophe restoration. Moreover, we’ve expanded the Ephemeral Disk portfolio from native NVMe to incorporate temp SSD help, enhancing value effectivity to be used circumstances that may leverage immediately connected native storage. With this announcement, we’re excited to introduce three new capabilities that may additional enhance the resiliency and efficiency of working stateful workloads:
- Improve the resiliency of your persistent volumes hosted on native NVMe storage (L-series ephemeral disks) with replication help.
- Improved persistent quantity restoration after a restart of an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.
- Customise the efficiency of your native NVMe storage with new efficiency tier choices.
Be taught extra about Azure Container Storage
Get began with putting in Azure Container Storage to your AKS cluster! For a complete information, watch our step-by-step walkthrough video. It’s also possible to discover workload samples from our newly launched neighborhood repository to create your first stateful utility. To be taught extra, check with our AKS engineering weblog. We encourage everybody to contribute and share your insights as you discover our latest storage providing.
In case you have any questions, please attain out to AskContainerStorage@microsoft.com. Embrace the way forward for stateful containers with Azure and unlock new prospects!