“Kubernetes is like a tsunami that is moving through every organization that’s doing computation,” said Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. “It’s lifting everyone off of the virtual machine world and putting them into the container world.”

However, the whole focus of cloud-native computing and Kubernetes was around scaling out stateless workloads. What about the state that the applications are supposed to manipulate? Users were left to their own devices to tackle those problems through things like a service broker.

Now as we start to see elasticity in the app layer, there is a need for application-aware elastic data layers to move around the cloud or on-premise.

That’s where the challenge begins. All the layers of data, whether it’s database layer, data management layer, or actual storage where users are writing the bits to the media. “All those things have to become application-aware and understand what Kubernetes is doing with the apps and figure out how to provision that data in the right place at the right time at the right cost,” said Ramji.

DataStax announced K8ssandra (pronounced Kate Sandra) to address this problem. “Users will be able to use K8ssandra and have an incredibly available scalable database that runs natively on Kubernetes and in their clusters,” he said.

This discussion with Ramji covers a wide range of topics. Here are some of the topics we covered:
00:00:27 State of data in the cloud-native world?
00:03:32 Data is expanding, which is creating new challenges for data.
00:06:30 Announcing K8ssandra at KubeCon
00:11:04 How does K8ssandra work?
00:13:24 What about security?
00:19:07 Ethical issues around data collection and processing
00:20:49 Impact of open source on how we collaborate with each other.

You can also listen to it on SoundCloud: