DEVOPSdigest

Ondat released into general availability version 2.8 of its Ondat platform for stateful workloads in Kubernetes.

The new version brings significant changes that open up the option of running a robust ETCD setup within production clusters, removing the need for external service setup. This change reduces operational overhead and cost for production users.

Key enhancements in v2.8 include:

- Snapshots provide additional confidence in the safety of user data. Snapshots can be used with other backup and disaster recovery services to create backups of your data outside of the cluster (i.e., in AWS S3 backups) for audit, disaster recovery and regulatory compliance. These backups can be used to restore applications to a known state, create ad-hoc clones of applications at a chosen point in time or to keep a backup application instance up to date with the newest data to help make any failover as non-disruptive as possible.

- ETCD clusters can now run within Kubernetes itself. This reduces costs by eliminating the need to run ETCD—a highly-available key value store for cluster data in Kubernetes—in separate compute instances. At the same time, it lowers operational burdens and increases agility for developers. Most container-native storage solutions still require ETCD to run outside the cluster for production workloads.

- Prometheus endpoints are now supported. Ondat 2.8 provides information around the disks and filesystems underpinning each volume on every node, and the information includes key metrics that can trigger alerts should anything occur that demands attention, allowing users to stay ahead of any potential problems. The metrics provided will help users analyze a cluster's utilization and performance and drive improvements. A user’s Prometheus instance needs only to communicate with a single endpoint where data for all Ondat volumes will be collated and presented.

“Our customers have come to rely on Ondat to support the performance and reliability that their stateful workloads require in Kubernetes,” said Alex Chircop, founder and CEO of Ondat. “With version 2.8, we’ve added several important new features they’ve asked for, including snapshots and the ability to run ETCD within their clusters. Taken together, these new capabilities further extend the enterprise capabilities in Ondat, making it an increasingly popular choice.”

With the growing popularity of containers and microservices, infrastructure teams have come face-to-face with the complexity of running stateful workloads like databases and messaging systems in Kubernetes. DevOps teams have worked around this limitation by hosting stateful applications outside of the Kubernetes infrastructure. This, in turn, has increased costs and complexity, whilst reducing performance.

Ondat delivers a container-native storage platform that delivers the data services, performance and resiliency to run these workloads natively in Kubernetes. Ondat customers that are running mission-critical databases in their clusters reduce operational overhead while benefiting from the cost and performance savings that Kubernetes delivers.