Sunday, August 12, 2018

Portworx expands container data management options for AWS

Portworx, a start-up based in Los Altos, California announced that its PX-Enterprise can now be integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), enabling mission critical stateful workloads to run in Docker containers with dynamic provisioning, cross-Availability Zone high availability, application consistent snapshots, auto-scaling and encryption functionality.

Portworx can also be integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS).

"Enterprise container adoption is skyrocketing as companies recognize the value that container technologies provide on the path to digital transformation," said Murli Thirumale, co-founder and CEO of Portworx. "Amazon Web Services integration with Portworx for both EKS and now ECS is evidence of a sea change happening in the industry: enterprises running on Amazon need flexible cloud native storage solutions that play well containers. By giving enterprises these two options for container data management, we're radically simplifying operations of containerized stateful services running on Amazon."

Key benefits of Amazon ECS with Portworx's cloud native storage include:

  • Multi-AZ EBS for Containers – Docker containers within and across Availability Zones based on business needs. Portworx will not only replicate each container's volume data among ECS nodes and across Availability Zones, but also add additional EBS drives based on reaching capacity thresholds.
  • Daemon Scheduling on ECS:  automatically run a daemon task on every one of a selected set of instances in an ECS cluster. This ensures that as ECS adds new nodes, every server can consume and access Portworx storage volumes.
  • Auto-scaling groups for stateful applications – dynamic creation of EBS volumes for an ASG, so if a pod is rescheduled after a host failure, the pre-existing EBS volume will be reused, reducing failover time by 300%.
  • Hyperconverged compute and storage for ultra-high performance databases – ECS can reschedule the pod to another host in the cluster where Portworx has placed an up-to-date replica. This ensures hyperconvergence is maintained even across reschedules.
  • Application-aware snapshots – ECS administrators can define groups of volumes that constitute their application state and consistently snapshot directly via .docker. These group snapshots can be backed up to S3 or moved directly to another Amazon region in case of a disaster.