How to build a Software as a Service offering on Kubernetes - new

The Challenge

You have chosen Kubernetes as the orchestration platform to build and scale your SaaS application. But scaling and protecting data services running on Kubernetes requires that you solve automated operations, data mobility, backup and disaster recovery, and data security, all without burdening your already thinly-stretched SRE team.

Massive scale data services

When your SaaS app is under load, your data services need to scale instantly. Scaling out stateless services is easy, but stateful services pose different challenges.

Application Diversity

Each data service has its own operational best practices but hiring an SRE for each is difficult at best and impossible at worst. And buying an enterprise support agreement for dozens of data services eats into your SaaS margins.

Disparate Environments

You can pick your own cloud, but increasingly enterprise SaaS buyers want to run your app in their data center. Containers solve the infrastructure differences between clouds and on-prem data centers for compute, but don’t address the particularities of running stateful apps in different environments.

Uncontrolled self-service

Developers building microservices to power your SaaS want self-service, but you can’t afford to give up control for corporate policies like security, data retention, backups and more.

Enterprise requirements for enterprise buyers

Inability to meet enterprise requirements for security, backup, disaster recovery, performance, and compliance prevents apps from running on Kubernetes.

Reliability and Scale

Most Kubernetes storage solutions work ok for POCs but when you get into production, they start to fray and crack. Not what you want when you see large usage spikes on your SaaS.

The Portworx Solution

Designed specifically for applications running on Kubernetes, Portworx solves the unique challenges faced by SaaS architects.

Data services at SaaS scale

Kubernetes was invented at Google because software services like YouTube and Search require massive scale. With Portworx you can scale your own backend data services easily, without scaling up your SRE staff.

Run all stateful apps

Portworx understands how the operational requirements of each data service differ and provides app-specific capabilities for deployments, snapshots and more, so you don’t have to be an expert in each data service that runs on your platform.

Run on all infrastructures

Portworx aggregates your underlying storage in the cloud (AWS EBS, Google PD, etc) or on-prem (bare metal, NetApp, EMC, vSAN, etc) and turns it into a container-native storage fabric. So, when an enterprise buyer asks you to deploy your SaaS in their datacenter, you can say, “No problem.”

Performance

Portworx delivers near bare metal performance while offering optional hyper-convergence of Pods and data volumes for super fast data locality, even in the case of Node failures.

Disaster Recovery

Traditional DR solutions are machine-based, not container-granular. And they certainly can’t be applied at the Kubernetes namespace level. Not so with Portworx. We provide zero-RPO disaster recovery for apps and their data, natively integrated into Kubernetes.