Cloud Storage Services for Cloud Native Applications
Cloud storage is vital to the work of cloud native applications, so choosing from a large portfolio of cloud services can be difficult. Today’s end-to-end, or edge-to-cloud workloads are distributed by design. But the age-old problems of latency, slow transfers of datasets and adequate replication are still with us.
The sheer amount of data is accelerating, driven by cloud based applications, new workloads (AI and ML) and edge-based sensors. IDC has estimated that total worldwide data growing from more than 16 zettabytes (ZB) stored worldwide in 2016 to more than 160ZB stored worldwide by 2025.
Clearly, developers will be looking to Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) for help in storing, accessing and managing those huge amounts of object data. Most of that data is expected to be unstructured data, stored in the hybrid cloud, that will be stored and accessed as cloud based object data. However, enterprise applications are being modified or rewritten for use in hybrid clouds, prompting the need to store block-based and file-based data, along with the object data generated by cloud native applications.
Cloud service providers can ease developers’ tasks with automated cloud storage services, hiding some of the complexity where developers’ actions are not needed. As long as Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are being met by the CSPs, DevOps personnel may not need to get directly involved in hands-on data placement for high availability and operational efficiency.
However, IT organizations should study their options before concluding that all of the needed functionality is baked-in to their CSP’s storage services. Most of the basic functions for cloud-object storage are covered by the major CSPs — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). But DevOps will still need to have a check-off list for enterprise workloads, migrating to the cloud, when examining cloud storage services that will protect mission-critical data. And they will need data-management software, and consoles, to give IT a unified view of all stored data — often provided by systems vendors or software companies (ISVs). Third-party SD-WAN providers are also part of the hybrid cloud storage ecosystem.
Competition among the major CSPs means that cloud storage services, especially for cloud object storage, are generally covering the same ground in terms of cloud stage services functionality. The major CSPs address the need to scale applications in term of capacity, to provide rapid data search, multiple region security and high availability. Also on a CIO’s radar: how will we manage and maintain all of that cloud storage? Performance, scalability, and costs are key concerns for cloud native workloads.
What do cloud-native applications really need? New storage requirements needed for these applications are really a mix of functionality and performance enhancements – although the exact mix will vary based on application specifics. “When you look at storage needs for cloud-native applications, there are broadly two types of new needs that start to emerge,” said Deepak Mohan, Research Director for IDC’s Worldwide Storage Group.
One need is scalability – because cloud-native applications for Internet-scale use cases are typically built on scale-out architectures. This requires the data layer and storage platform to be highly scalable — to scale up to thousands, or hundreds of thousands — of data entities in a flexible manner. “Object storage in the cloud was built with this vision in mind,” Mohan said. ”Large numbers of objects can be stored and delivered in a scalable and reliable manner.”
The other need is performance, Mohan said. “As compute gets more stateless – through transient containers or native serverless options – storage is where application state is being maintained,” he said.
