Container Storage for Dummies

Developer focus and interest has led to new containers built to permit applications to scale rapidly, be more reliable, and offer better performance than more conventional means or methods. While developers like to think about what’s possible, admins tend to think in terms of what’s stable. They must be able to manage infrastructures quickly and easily and want to know how containers can meet those requirements.

Although many organizations still use traditional storage appliances, they weren’t originally designed for or optimized to a container based environment. Thus, they don’t offer the agility needed by containerized environments. Containers are highly flexible and bring incredible scale to how apps and storage are delivered; traditional storage can often be the bottleneck that stops this progress. The underlying storage should be highly elastic, easily provisioned by developers and admins, and, ideally, managed using the same orchestration framework (like Kubernetes) used for application containers.

You discover throughout this book that a key part of achieving flexibility and scalability is container-native storage, a type of storage deployed inside containers along with the apps already running there.