Kubernetes Storage and Data Management for Amazon EKS using Portworx

In the past couple of years, we have seen organizations increasingly adopt Kubernetes to accelerate the time to market for their applications. According to the “The State of Enterprise Open Source: A Red Hat report 2022,” “70% of IT leaders…work for organizations that use Kubernetes and almost a third plan to significantly increase their use of containers over the next 12 months.” Datadog reports that “almost 90% of Kubernetes organizations use a managed service,” such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), as opposed to running self-managed clusters.” Amazon EKS allows organizations to reduce the complexity and operational cost associated with running self-managed Kubernetes clusters while improving the security posture of their infrastructure at the same time.

Earlier this year, Portworx by Pure Storage announced a strategic engagement with AWS to help Amazon EKS customers with enterprise storage capabilities that make it easier for them to run data-rich Kubernetes applications at scale. Portworx has been identified by industry analysts as the “Gold Standard” when it comes to Kubernetes storage, and we have been helping our customers modernize and adopt Kubernetes for more than half a decade. Portworx complements Amazon EKS and brings the following benefits to customers who are looking to adopt Amazon EKS or increase their use of Kubernetes in AWS.

Benefits of adopting Portworx with Amazon EKS:

Availability

Portworx allows users to define replication factors as part of their Kubernetes StorageClass definition. Any persistent volumes provisioned using this StorageClass automatically store the number of replicas you have specified across your Amazon EKS worker nodes. Portworx spreads out these replicas across different availability zones (AZs) as well. This makes your containerized applications highly available and covered against any data loss in case a worker node or an AZ goes offline.

Scalability

Portworx allows users to customize their Amazon EKS cluster, such that only a subset of the worker nodes is contributing storage to your containerized applications. This allows users to scale up their compute capacity, as needed, without paying for additional storage. Portworx also allows users to get more bang for their buck by provisioning 100s of persistent volumes per Amazon EKS worker node vs adding more Amazon EKS worker nodes to provision more storage.

Operational Management

Portworx automates the Day 0 deployment and simplifies the Day 2 operations for Amazon EKS clusters. To deploy Portworx, you simply need to generate a specification using Portworx Central and apply it against your Amazon EKS clusters. Portworx automates the deployment and attachment of Amazon EBS volumes to your Amazon EKS worker nodes and aggregates individual volumes into a unified storage pool to provision block and file storage. Users no longer must deploy and configure individual CSI drivers for EBS (Block) and EFS (File) storage for their applications.

In addition to automating Day 0 deployment, Portworx also allows users to perform non-disruptive upgrades of Kubernetes versions, Amazon Machine Image (AMI) versions, and Portworx.

Portability

One of the key benefits of Kubernetes is the uniform orchestration platform it provides to deploy containerized applications anywhere. This also applies to Amazon EKS, as you can deploy Amazon EKS clusters on any AWS region—in fact, you can even deploy it on-prem using Amazon EKS Anywhere or Amazon EKS for AWS Outposts. However, Amazon EKS lacks the ability to migrate already running applications across these different clusters. Portworx, allows users to migrate their applications across any Amazon EKS, Amazon EKS Anywhere, or Amazon EKS on AWS Outposts clusters, unlocking true application portability across different Kubernetes clusters, running different Kubernetes versions, and running on different infrastructure stacks.

Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is one of the key requirements for any application running in production. Portworx allows users to create asynchronous and synchronous disaster recovery solutions for their Amazon EKS clusters that insures them against any data loss as well as any node, cluster, availability zone, or region failures. Portworx allows users to customize their recovery point and recovery time objectives for their applications to meet the most demanding service level agreements.

Cost Optimization

Portworx allows users to start small and scale on demand for their storage needs. Using Portworx Autopilot, users can configure “IFTTT” rules, where Portworx Autopilot will monitor the storage utilization for individual Kubernetes persistent volumes and the underlying storage pool and automatically expand the volumes and the storage pool to accommodate the increasing storage needs without any application downtime.

Data Protection

Portworx PX-Backup, a Kubernetes-native tool that understands how modern applications are built and deployed on Amazon EKS, allows users to create backup and restore jobs for containerized applications running on Amazon EKS clusters. Portworx PX-Backup also allows users to protect their end-to-end applications, including not just the data, but any application configuration and Kubernetes objects as well. These backup snapshots are stored in Amazon S3 buckets and can be used to restore your applications to the same or different Amazon EKS clusters.

These capabilities allow organizations to solve the challenges associated with running stateful applications in production on Amazon EKS. To try out any of these capabilities, you can start a 30-day free trial using Portworx Central or subscribe using our AWS Marketplace listings. And if you need help deploying Portworx on an Amazon EKS cluster, you can watch the demonstration below.