DoK Talks #71 Introducing Kubestr: A new way to benchmark your Kubernetes storage // Michael Cade

Abstract of the talk…

Benchmarking storage is not a new concept, this has been happening on storage for a long time. But have we overlooked the benchmarking capabilities or at least the ease in which to achieve this in a cloud-native, container-based, Kubernetes landscape? There has been a rise in stateful workloads and support around persistent storage in Kubernetes is improving. Now we can take our traditional workloads such as SQL Server, Oracle and SAP alongside our data stores for microservices with the same storage system for MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, MySQL and PostgreSQL. With each of these stateful applications having different performance requirements, it becomes necessary to benchmark the storage backing these Persistent volumes. The CSI (Container Storage Interface) is the standard for creating custom components to work with data storage. This has enabled many more storage vendors to adopt their platforms to the cloud-native approach and offerings. All of this is great, but how do we ensure that the right datastore is used to achieve the performance required for our microservices running these stateful workloads?

Bio…

A community first technologist for Kasten by Veeam Software. Based in the UK with over 16 years of industry experience with a key focus on technologies such as cloud-native, automation & data management. His role at Kasten is to act as a technical thought leader, community champion and project owner to engage with the community to enable influencers and customers to overcome the challenges of Cloud-Native Data Management and be successful, speaking at events sharing the technical vision and corporate strategy whilst providing ongoing feedback from the field into product management to shape the future success.

Key take-aways from the talk…

Kubestr can assist here in three ways: · Identify the various storage options present in a cluster. · Validate if the storage options are configured correctly. · Evaluate the storage using common benchmarking tools like FIO.