Aurea Software Goes Beyond the Limits of Amazon EBS to Run 200 Kubernetes Stateful Pods Per Host

Challenges

• Create a single, multi-tenant Kubernetes platform capable of handling databases workloads for 80 different SaaS companies
• Traditional software-defined storage systems like Ceph and GlusterFS don’t integrate well with Kubernetes or scale to the required levels
• Limited to only 40 EBS volumes per EC2 instance when using Amazon EBS for container storage, requiring them to overprovision VMs by 5x

Solution

• Portworx provides a single, cloud native storage and data management layer for Kubernetes, no matter which stateful services Aurea’s platform users require
• Portworx allowed Aurea to easily blow past the 40 EBS volume limit imposed by Linuxnetworking in order to run 200 container volumes per EC2 instance

Our clusters are highly dense, meaning we run a lot of containers per host. On AWS, we use huge instances. The recommendation from Kubernetes is 100 pods per VM. Already, we’re running 200-300 pods per host. Also, since most of the apps that we run are stateful, we can easily have 200-300 volumes per host as well. And we’re working to push these limits even further. Because of these densities enabled by Kubernetes and Portworx, we’re easily saving 60-90% on our compute costs. Portworx itself was between 30-50% cheaper than any other storage solution we tested.”