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What is Bare Metal Kubernetes and why should you choose it?

As the demand for scalable and flexible infrastructure solutions continues to grow, more and more organizations are turning to Kubernetes for their container orchestration needs. While many companies choose to deploy Kubernetes on cloud platforms such as AWS or Google Cloud, there is a growing trend towards deploying Kubernetes on bare metal infrastructure. With Kubernetes and containers, the plane of virtualization has shifted from hardware infrastructure to application, allowing efficient ways to meet the scale and elasticity that the platform desires.

Running bare metal Kubernetes means deploying Kubernetes clusters and their bare metal containers directly on physical servers instead of inside traditional virtual machines managed by a hypervisor layer. This means that containers running in a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster have direct access to the underlying server hardware. This would not be the case with clusters composed of virtual machines, which would abstract the containers from the underlying servers. Enterprises across the telecom and financial services industries deploy Kubernetes on bare metal in the data center to reduce costs, improve application workload performance, and avoid the exploding cost of VM licensing.

What are the reasons/benefits for choosing to deploy kubernetes on bare metal?

There are several reasons why organizations are choosing to deploy bare metal Kubernetes instead of using cloud providers or other hypervisors:

  1. High Performance: Bare-metal deployments eliminate the overhead of virtualization, providing direct access to hardware resources. This results in superior performance for both containerized applications and stateful workloads. Some enterprises have taken this a step further by coupling Bare Metal with the introduction of an NVMe-based infrastructure, yielding a significant improvement in both IOps and latency compared to cloud environments. The result is a storage architecture that can now match the performance and scale requirements of even the most data intensive containerized applications.
  2. Infrastructure Customization: Deploying Kubernetes on Bare Metal allows organizations to exercise complete control over their infrastructure. This empowers storage and platform teams to customize their hardware to meet their specific needs – customizing everything from hardware configuration to network settings to RAID. This customization enables more precise mapping of applications to the performance and reliability requirements they require.
  3. Modern Virtualization: The rise of KubeVirt and enterprise-grade products like Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization have opened up a pathway to run virtual machines alongside containers in bare metal environments. By leveraging Bare Metal, enterprises now have a platform that can support both VMs and containers while maintaining the performance level they require for their most important applications, whether containers or VMs. A Bare Metal infrastructure also enables enterprises to ensure a seamless transition of legacy applications to modern infrastructure, supporting a hybrid approach while unifying application management.
  4. Flexibility and Scalability: Deploying Kubernetes on bare metal offers greater flexibility and scalability. Organizations can easily add new nodes to the cluster as needed, adjust their infrastructure quickly in response to changing requirements, and maintain their competitive edge.
  5. Enhanced Security and Control: Security has become a top concern among Kubernetes users. With the Kubernetes bare metal infrastructure, organizations have more control over their security measures in the sense that it gives admins full control over the servers that host the nodes. They can implement custom security protocols and ensure that their data is protected. In contrast, if you run Kubernetes on VMs that are managed by, say, a cloud provider, organizations wouldn’t get a

Challenges for Deploying Bare Metal Kubernetes

While Bare Metal deployments come with a range of benefits compared to a virtual machine deployments, enterprises running Kubernetes at scale on bare metal will eventually run into the same challenge – how to effectively address the storage and data management of the underlying infrastructure to maintain the scale, performance, and data services required for applications.

Enter Portworx by Pure Storage

Portworx is a software-defined storage platform that enables persistent storage for containerized applications running on bare metal. Portworx virtualizes the underlying storage – whether bare metal, cloud, virtualized or a combination – to create a shared storage pool that sits within the Kubernetes control plane. This abstraction allows Portworx to offer a set of consistent storage and data services – like kubernetes backup and disaster recovery – to support any application running on Kubernetes, irrespective of the underlying storage.

One of the key benefits of using Portworx for deploying Kubernetes on bare metal is that it simplifies the process of managing storage for containerized applications. With Portworx, you don’t need to worry about provisioning storage volumes or managing storage classes manually. Its container-native storage platform automates these processes, making it easy to deploy and manage stateful applications on Kubernetes.

Another important capability of Portworx is its ability to provide multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support. This means you can deploy Kubernetes clusters across different infrastructure environments, including on-premises data centers, public clouds, and edge sites, and still get consistent storage management capabilities across all of them. Portworx provides agnostic support for how customers deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters, including on bare metal.

Portworx also provides several benefits when deploying air-gapped Kubernetes clusters on bare metal. First and foremost, it enables organizations to run their containerized applications with confidence and ease in a closed, secure environment without access to public clouds or other external resources. One of the key benefits of Portworx in this scenario is its ability to provide high availability and reliability through its distributed storage architecture. This architecture allows for data replication across multiple nodes, ensuring seamless failover in case of node failures and preventing data loss or downtime. Additionally, Portworx provides scalability through its ability to scale storage and compute resources independently. This means that as your organization grows and expands, you can easily add more storage capacity without having to add more compute resources, or vice versa. This helps to ensure that your Kubernetes cluster remains optimized and performing at peak capacity.

Installing Kubernetes on Bare Metal

The first step to installing Kubernetes on Bare Metal is to decide what Kubernetes Distribution to use. The rise of bare metal deployments means that enterprises can largely choose from any of the major Kubernetes distributions in this architecture. This ranges from options like Red Hat OpenShift and SUSE Rancher to even public cloud options like Amazon EKS and Google Anthos which now support bare metal deployments.

Once a Kubernetes Distribution has been identified, it’s important for enterprises to look at the prerequisites and dependencies. Some Kubernetes distributions may only support bare metal in certain use cases, like at the edge or on-premises, while others may provide more comprehensive deployment options. The next step is to architect the storage layer following the best practices of Kubernetes storage.

Portworx provides its own set of prerequisites and dependencies and has written a more detailed reference architecture for Portworx on OpenShift on Bare Metal deployments.

OpenShift Cluster

Successful Bare Metal Kubernetes Deployments Using Portworx

The platform engineering team at one of the nation’s largest media and entertainment companies is responsible for building and deploying a platform that ingests petabytes of data into low-latency databases such as ElasticSearch and MongoDB. It is crucial for them to gather subscriber analytics in order to comprehend users’ usage patterns and facilitate quicker problem-solving. Additionally, data analytics and aggregation are carried out to recognize data patterns and enhance subscriber experiences. By having an efficient, low-overhead storage layer with the Portworx Enterprise platform and backing their cloud-native storage solution for Kubernetes storage with high-bandwidth and extremely performant NVMe devices, they ensured that their applications were rarely, if ever, starved at the storage layer in terms of IOPS and throughput. This, combined with the ultra-low latencies provided by NVMe devices, ensured that the volume provisioning and I/O utilization for the applications running on Kubernetes could operate at high speeds and at massive scale. With Portworx, this customer achieves a 1 million+ IOPS increase in underlying NVMe performance with a near-zero failure rate.

The platform team as this global technology and logistics company was looking to support their business and mission critical workloads on OpenShift on Bare Metal with only a small team to scale the adoption of stateful workloads on this platform. By leveraging Portworx and Pure Storage, this platform team has been able to begin migrating core workloads onto OpenShift on Bare Metal without introducing additional operational overhead. This customer has also been able to begin migrating repatriating data away from the public cloud to take advantage of their on-premises, bare metal deployment.

These customers are just the tip of the iceberg. As bare metal Kubernetes deployments continue to grow, customers leveraging Portworx to provide the storage and data management will continue to benefit from the full breadth of the Portworx Platform to extract the most of of the underlying infrastructure.

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