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Portworx Kubemotion™ (formally known as PX-Motion), was released in December 2018 as part of Portworx Enterprise 2.0, and has quickly become one of our most popular features. It is not hard to see why. Portworx Kubemotion is the first and only Kubernetes application migration solution that moves application configuration and data in a single command. It is designed to extend the portability of Kubernetes to include stateful workloads such as databases, AI/ML, IoT and big data workloads at the heart of Portworx’s enterprise customer base.

With Kubemotion, Portworx solved the critical problem of data portability by enabling customers to migrate application data and configuration between clusters for Kubernetes to truly enable hybrid- and multi-cloud portability.

This article highlights five scenarios enabled by Portworx Kubemotion that help enterprises get the best out of their Kubernetes-based hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Capacity Augmentation

Enterprises building a hybrid cloud have investments that span on-premises data centers and the public cloud. In a hybrid environment, IT often needs to move workloads between an on-premises data center and public cloud infrastructure.

One of the motivations for moving workloads is to free up resources in the data center to accommodate newer applications. In hybrid environments, it is common for IT to run applications locally when the demand is at its peak, and then move them to the public cloud to release local resources. An employee performance appraisal application is a typical example of such seasonal application that’s only in peak demand during a specific time of the year.

While this process is simple with traditional VM-based workloads, moving Kubernetes applications between clusters is not trivial.

With Kubemotion, customers can move cloud-native applications from one environment to another with full automation. For example, if a bare-metal cluster is becoming a resource bottleneck, and the customer wants to migrate workloads to a different data center or the public cloud where there is scope for growth, this is easily accomplished with Kubemotion.

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Kubemotion not only moves the application data but also the entire configuration and associated Kubernetes objects to the target environment. This capability enables customers to free up compute resources by moving less-utilized workloads to a different environment.

Blue/Green Deployments

Blue-green deployments are often used to reduce downtime and risk by allowing controlled testing of two different production environments labeled as Blue and Green. At any time, only one of the environments is live which serves the production traffic.

Users are invited to use the “green” version of the application to report any UX-related problems. DevOps and SRE teams closely monitor the deployment to find possible issues with the newer version so roll traffic back to the “blue” version if any problems are detected.

While Kubernetes makes it easy to configure blue/green deployments for stateless applications, it doesn’t address the need to apply the same configuration to data-centric, stateful applications.

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Through Kubemotion, customers can extend the blue/green deployment technique to stateful applications by simplifying the movement of data and application configuration between two environments.

With Kubemotion, it is also possible to run two different versions of the same stateful application in different clusters configured in a hybrid scenario (on-prem and cloud) to perform blue/green deployments.

Better debugging with copies of production data

It is common for enterprises to mix and match the development, testing, staging, and production environments across on-premises and public cloud. To meet compliance and regulations, some organizations prefer the public cloud for development and testing while targeting on-prem for production. Some customers develop locally and deploy in the cloud to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud.

Irrespective of where the dev/test environments are configured, they need to closely mimic the production environment. The discrepancies between dev/test and production environment make developers less efficient and productive. IT will have to spend time debugging and fixing app deployments and configuration due to the difference between the two environments.

Even though it is easy to replicate the environment through configuration, keeping the data in sync between dev/test and production is a challenge. The development and test teams should use the same data as the production environment to reduce errors and discrepancies.

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Kubemotion can be utilized to automate the configuration of dev/test environments with the same state as the production environments. DevOps teams can schedule jobs that periodically backup the storage volumes used in production and restore them in dev/test environments. Dev and test teams can choose to target the latest version of data that is in sync with production.

Kubemotion provides automation and management for the full lifecycle of copy data – whether it lives on-premises or in the cloud. When the gap between environments is reduced, customers get the benefit of faster time-to-market.

Workload Portability

One of the motivations for customers to adopt cloud-native architecture is the promise of portability. Even though Kubernetes makes it easy to move applications across different deployment targets and environments, the promise of portability is confined to stateless applications.

Kubernetes abstracts the underlying resources – compute, storage, and network – that decouples applications from the physical or virtual infrastructure. The abstraction of Kubernetes brings ultimate portability to cloud-native applications, delivering the promise of code once, run anywhere. But, the portability of cloud-native apps running on Kubernetes is largely confined to stateless workloads. Due to this limitation, DevOps and DBAs struggle to move stateful applications across Kubernetes clusters.

With Kubemotion, Portworx solved the critical problem of data portability of applications running on Kubernetes by enabling customers to migrate application data and configuration between clusters across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments.

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Portworx and Kubemotion are supported in all the environments including Anthos, IBM Cloud Private, VMware Enterprise PKS, Red Hat OpenShift and other distributions of Kubernetes.

Kubemotion can seamlessly move data and stateful workloads across the on-premises clusters and cloud-based Kubernetes clusters configured in a hybrid environment.

Zero-RPO Disaster Recovery

Zero-RPO Disaster Recovery allows applications to be recovered from a DR site with zero data loss.

PX-DR, powered by Kubemotion, delivers zero RPO disaster recovery for data centers in a metropolitan area as well as continuous backups across the WAN for an even greater level of protection.

Within a hybrid cloud, PX-DR can be configured to constantly synchronize data and configuration between the on-prem and public cloud environments. It can also be extended to multi-cloud deployments that run in the same region where the latency is within double-digit milliseconds.

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With PX-DR and Kubemotion, customers can perform a live migration of stateful workloads with almost no downtime.

Kubemotion can seamlessly move data and stateful workloads across the on-premises clusters and cloud-based Kubernetes clusters configured in a hybrid environment.

No matter which environment and Kubernetes platform you deploy, Portworx and Kubemotion form the storage fabric of your hybrid cloud.

Try Kubemotion today

Interested in solving data mobility issues for your mission-critical applications running on Kubernetes? Request a demo of Kubemotion today and join the growing number of Portworx customers succeeding with their hybrid cloud initiatives.

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About Us
Portworx is the leader in cloud native storage for containers.

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Janakiram MSV

Contributor | Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and Developer (CKAD)
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