StorageOS' Take on Containers

Thanks to Chris Brandon, CEO of StorageOS for sharing his thoughts on the orchestration and deployment of containers.

Q: How is your company involved in the orchestration and deployment of containers?

A: We provide a persistent storage solution for containers that integrates with orchestration systems like Docker EE (Swarm), Kubernetes, and Mesos. Our product is deployed in a container and uses the scheduler to scale, delivering portable, scalable, and automatable storage for containers.

Q: What do you see as the most important elements of orchestrating and deploying containers?

A: The most important elements of container orchestration are policy and automation. The flexibility of a container allows you to move and scale workloads and automate this in ways you can’t do with VMs. This framework is also very open and API driven, allowing us to integrate our persistent storage solution with the scheduler so we can make sure the storage and data live on the same node, a feature we call data locality.

Q: Which programming languages, frameworks, and tools do you, or your company use, to orchestrate and deploy containers?

A: We develop in C and Go and we use React and Django. We integrate with Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos.

Q: How has the orchestration and deployment of containers changed application development?

A: It has simplified it significantly and decreased time to market and cost, and allows us to scale up or down more quickly.

Q: What kind of security techniques and tools do you find most effective for orchestrating and deploying containers?

A: We are providing secure storage for containers through implementing in line 256bit AES encryption of data at rest and in flight. We also use TLS for encryption of traffic between the nodes. We use SSL for front end web security.

Q: What are some real-world problems being solved by the orchestration and deployment of containers? 

A: Containers solve devops problems such as software being tied to specific platforms, difficulties in moving software between environments (dev/test/prod), and having to manage virtual machines. Orchestration solves running containers at scale, which we have seen as the back end to trading platforms, video content delivery, e-commerce, web platforms.

Q: What are the most common issues you see affecting the orchestration and deployment of containers?

A: This is a new market, and there is a lack of skill and a great deal of change and complexity. The industry will need to standardize, consolidate, and simplify for mass adoption.

Enterprises looking to move to containers and orchestration are highlighting the lack of powerful, mature storage and networking solutions in container orchestration. StorageOS solves enterprise storage needs such as database deployments (MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, Postgres), CI/CD testing, high availability, backup, and encrypted archive.

Q: Do you have any concerns regarding the current state of orchestrating and deploying containers?

A: We are very concerned about security, high availability, and disaster recovery, and our solutions focuses on delivering a broad reaching solution. We are also seeing lots of concerns around policy and roles management.

Q: What’s the future for containers from your point of view - where do the greatest opportunities lie?

A: They are being used widely for new application deployment, dev environment (CI/CD), and cloud deployments. We see retail (e-commerce), financial services (archive, data analysis, customer interaction, trading), and service providers as the greatest areas of opportunity.

Q: What do developers need to keep in mind when working on orchestrating and deploying containers?

A: Container systems do not have persistent storage natively. The data is lost when a container reboots, and connecting to NAS or legacy SAN technologies can be complicated and has real performance, scalability, and portability issues. Storage and data security must be included in the design from the beginning.

Q: How do you get started with a storage solution for container environment.

A: Go here.