It’s time again for another edition of Emerging Trends Weekly for October 25th 2022. You can find this weeks edition by following this link. Last week saw the OCP (Open Compute) release a bunch of new stuff, primarily for the hyperscalers and their ongoing push into large scale AI/ML operations. Along with those new designs, comes a lot of discussion on the networking and bandwidth requirements that appear to be growing at an astonishing rate. Also, we continue to see a lot of noise around CXL for memory disaggregation but also storage operations. While still very much in its infancy, CXL shows a lot of promise and during my time at Fungible, it would come up in conversations weekly for those organizations looking at disaggregation of expensive infrastructure assets such as GPU, Storage, and Memory. Containers continue to be a huge driver for our industry, and I address that down below in this week’s featured article.
Top Ten Stories for the week of Oct 25th 2022:
- R&D: Hello Bytes, Bye Blocks, PCIe Storage Meets Compute Express Link for Memory Expansion
- Stupid pill’: Fees for moving data around the cloud persist despite rising customer ire
- A Brief History of Kubernetes, Its Use Cases, and Its Problems
- Basecamp decamps from cloud: ‘Renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal’
- The Past, Present and Future of VASA and VMware vVols
- Linbit SDS V.2.0 Software-Defined Storage Solution for Linux Platforms
- Can Any Emerging Memory Technology Topple DRAM and NAND Flash?
- StorONE’s New Drive-Based Pricing Model
- Frozen in time: Gartner Magic quadrant for primary storage
- How Giant AI Workloads and the Looming “Bandwidth Wall” are Impacting System Architectures
The deep dive for this week relates to the ongoing growth of Kubernetes/Container workloads and the continual shift to application modernization for stateful applications. From a survey done by DOK and a summary presented over at The New Stack: More Database, Analytics Workloads Ran on Kubernetes in 2022
More than three-quarters (76%) of survey participants now acknowledge the use of databases on Kubernetes, up from 50% just last year. Analytics workloads have also jumped significantly, the report states, going from 39% to 67%.
Actually running stateful applications (those including data saved to persistent disk storage) is not relatively common in the abstract. A year ago, 55% of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s 2021 user survey were doing this. Yet, based on the DoK report, the mix of application types that use data on Kubernetes appears to be growing.
The new report surveyed more than 500 Kubernetes users that run data workloads on Kubernetes. Consistency and ease of management are the leading factors behind running data workloads on Kubernetes, which are both critical to ensuring that widespread, production use of containers can be handled.
Notably, among those using data on Kubernetes, there was no increase in utilizing persistent storage, and an actual decline in streaming or messaging workloads.
Commentary: I’ve been watching the growth of Kubernetes since 2014 when Docker presented at the OpenStack conference in Atlanta. At the time OpenStack was riding high and there was a lot of interest in it being used to replace existing hypervisor based platforms. As we have all seen, the focus on OpenStack has dropped off significantly as many organizations embraced Containers for their microservice based applications. Though it’s still used in the Telecom, Gaming, and Service Provider industries, its use in the enterprise has waned. Much of that is in part because VMware, RedHat and others embraced containers and pushed significant resources into making them easier to manage, deploy, and operate.
All of that said, Container usage is growing, and the types of applications for which they are being used and adoption in the enterprise for some of the more traditional workloads continues to expand. Persistent data is becoming more important for organizations using container workloads, though it still seems to be attributed to a small percentage of revenue generating applications. As more database systems are being containerized, I expect this number to grow. The full report is linked here, and it’s worth browsing through, the main article above gives a good highlight of key takeaways.