Guest: Chris Milsted (LinkedIn)
Company: Ondat (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Ondat is a container-native storage solution that enables companies to run their database or any persistent workload in a Kubernetes environment without worrying about the storage layer. In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Chris Milsted, Customer Success Architect at Ondat, to talk about the current state of Kubernetes storage solutions space and how Ondat fared in the recent performance benchmarking evaluation conducted by Architecting IT.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Milsted defines traditional storage as kind of like a storage array, i.e., it is external to whatever you’re powering. Container-native storage is something that runs anywhere Kubernetes runs, whatever your Kubernetes distribution of choice. Cloud-native storage is a solution that is native to the specific cloud that you’re running in.
• When looking for container-native solutions, the primary requirement should be dynamic provisioning.
• The storage solutions available in the market right now are actually very mature. Ondat has been around for about 7 years as a startup. According to the recent benchmarking report, there are about 4-5 options out there, some of which have been around even longer.
• Milsted has seen data-first companies pushing their cloud native Postgres solution as the primary mechanism for running Postgres at scale. He has also seen a core banking application being delivered as a Kubernetes native application. So, the biggest change and maturity have actually been in the applications, the business, and the independent software vendors. These people have seen the benefits of delivering everything in a Kubernetes way.
• Architecting IT conducted a series of tests to evaluate the performance of leading storage solutions using PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis database platforms against three metrics: latency, bandwidth, and throughput. The results were published in the 2022 Performance Benchmarking Report.
• Tests show that using software-defined container-native storage solutions, specifically Ondat, can survive availability zone outages. This means you could take vintage-style applications, i.e., applications that are not cloud native and didn’t have replication built into them, and you can actually build them into a Kubernetes cluster and survive availability zone failures.
• Companies can install Ondat into their Kubernetes cluster and they now have replication and the ability to recover. If there is an outage, they can turn on data encryption at rest.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.