Wow – more than 20,000 vSAN customers. What an amazing journey it has been. If you haven’t seen it, vSAN license bookings grew over 50% year-over-year in Q1 with a total customer count growing to over 20,000 (seekingalpha.com). Now we need to keep the pace and, as Duncan put it, remain the number 1 player in the hyperconverged and hybrid cloud world! As a sort of thank you to everyone who helped make this happen, Duncan and I have decided to lower the price of our vSAN Deep Dive book for 1 week. So, until Friday, June 7th, we have…
I’ve just returned from KubeCon 2019 in Barcelona, and was surprised to see such a keen interest in how Kubernetes consumed infrastructure related resources, especially storage. Although I have been writing about a lot of Kubernetes related items recently, I wanted to put together a primer on some storage concepts that might be useful as a stepping stone or even on-boarding process to some of you who are quite new to Kubernetes. I am going to talk about this from the point of view of vSphere and vSphere storage. Thus I will try to map vSphere storage constructs such as…
Day 2 at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 started with another set of keynotes. Bryan Liles started with a theme that Kubernetes is a platform for creating platforms. Kubernetes is not an end in itself, it is not a destination but it is a means of building something for future success. This was a good way to introduce us to some of the customer keynotes that were to follow. Bryan first introduced David Xia from Spotify. David shared with us his story of how Spotify deleted not one, but two of their three Kubernetes clusters during a migration. It was a pretty…
This year, I have once again been fortunate enough to attend KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, which is being held in Barcelona. This is my second such conference, having attended last years European event in Copenhagen. I was very interested in seeing how things have progressed, especially in the cloud native storage space. The morning started with the usual set of keynotes. Dan Kohn and Cheryl Hung filled us in on what is happening in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) space, sharing details about the increase in membership and contributors since the last conference. Of note, there are 7700 attendees…
If you’ve been following my posts for the last week or so, you’ll have noticed my write-ups on Velero backups and restores using the new release candidate (RC). I also did a recent write-up on Portworx volumes and snapshots. In this post, I’ll bring them both together, and show you how Velero and Portworx are integrated to allow backups and restores of container applications using Portworx volumes. However, first, let’s take a step back. As was highlighted to me recently, all of this is very new to a lot of people, so let’s spend a little time setting the context.…
As I continue on my cloud native storage journey, I found myself looking at Portworx. The reason for this was down to the fact that Portworx provide a plugin for the Heptio Velero product, and I was interested to see how this behaved on top of my vSphere on-premises infrastructure. I’ve written about Velero a few times already, and done a few posts where I leveraged the Restic plugin for snapshot functionality. Thus, I wanted to see how Portworx achieved the same thing, and wanted to learn about bit more about STORK, Portworx’s Storage Orchestrator for Kubernetes. I’ve written about…
A few weeks back, I took a look at Heptio Velero, formely known as Ark. Velero provides backup and restore capabilities for cloud native applications. During that research, I used a Couchbase DB as my application of choice for backup/restore. After speaking to Couchbase regarding that blog post, they strongly recommended I try the new Couchbase operator rather than the StatefulSet method that I was using for the application. Couchbase talk about the advantages of the operator approach over StatefulSets here. Now, while Couchbase provide steps on how to deploy Couchbase with their operator, they create it in the default…