Lucidity has pledged to bring some control to Kubernetes storage spending, extending its AutoScaler platform’s purview to the container orchestration platform.
Cofounder Vatsal Rastogi said Kubernetes support had been the “most asked for” feature from the block storage scaling specialist’s customers. Persistent storage was something of an afterthought when Kubernetes was originally developed, as it was designed for stateless workloads.
With steady adoption of the platform by traditional enterprises, as well as cloud native organizations, he continued, “We see organizations using Kubernetes, not just to manage their stateless real estate, but also to pretty much manage their entire ecosystem, which includes databases or other storage intensive workloads.”
Lucidity said “persistent volumes in Kubernetes can be a sneaky source of invisible waste”. While Kubernetes itself will scale up the number of instances automatically, the underlying storage is usually untouched and often underutilized.
So, Autoscaler will now scale persistent volumes up and down in Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service. Rastogi said its offering was built on three core principles, starting with ensuring integration with cloud service providers’ PaaS offerings, which is the preferred option for customers.
Secondly, it wanted to ensure no IO path intrusion. “We still want the great guys at Microsoft and great contributors at Linux doing the heavy lifting.” And, he said, “We want to ensure that we can seamlessly onboard existing storage.”
Hitting Pod Level
The service offers pod level isolation, and “We support fault tolerance, be it pod restart, rescheduling, eviction activities, all these, which are the basic fundamentals of Kubernetes.”
The ability to onboard existing storage was “very well appreciated” by existing customers, he said, “which again validates our thesis of customers being sensitive around existing storage.”
The service can save customers upto 70 percent of their cloud block storage spend, Lucidity claims.
When it comes to the proportion of spend in Kubernetes setups taken by storage, Rastogi said the “median is around 25 percent.”
The service has been rolled out on AWS initially, with Azure slated for launch soon, and GCP also on the roadmap. However, the firm doesn’t envision supporting smaller or regional providers anytime soon, despite the drive in many regions for more sovereign cloud and AI services.
Building AWS support had been a “very large effort” Rastogi said, and “Now we can as easily build a layer for Azure or for Google Cloud as well.” Those providers would account for up to 70 per cent of the market, he said, “We are a small company, and we want to focus our efforts into a niche segment where we have a better and a deeper understanding.”
Lucidity has also tweaked its AutoScaler service overall, with improved reporting, including more granular information and the ability to generate reports in seconds. It has also added bulk onboarding for Linux installations, allowing teams to add hundreds of instances in one shot.
