Nutanix Weekly: Running stateful applications with Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix HCI

Although Kubernetes was originally designed to run stateless workloads, the technology has matured over time and enterprises are increasingly adopting the platform to run their stateful applications. In a survey conducted by the Data on Kubernetes community, 90% of the respondents believe that Kubernetes is ready for stateful workloads, and 70% of them are already running them in production with databases taking the top spot. Having the ability to standardize different workloads on Kubernetes and ensure consistency are seen as the key factors that drive value for businesses.

Nutanix provides an industry-leading HCI platform that is ideal for running cloud-native workloads running on Kubernetes at scale. The Nutanix architecture offers better resilience for both Kubernetes platform components and application data. With the addition of each HCI node, apart from scaling the Kubernetes compute nodes, there is an additional storage controller as well which results in improved storage performance for your stateful applications. 

The Nutanix Unified Storage is made available to cloud-native applications with the Nutanix CSI driver. Applications use standard Kubernetes objects such as PersistentVolumeClaims, PersistentVolumes, and StorageClasses to access its capabilities. The CSI driver also enables users to take Persistent Volume snapshots using API objects VolumeSnaphot, VolumeSnapshotContent, and VolumeSnapshotClass. Snapshots represent a point-in-time copy of a volume and can be used to provision a new volume or to restore existing volumes to the previous snapshotted data. OpenShift Container Platform deploys the snapshot controller and the related API objects as part of the Nutanix CSI Operator as described in Blog 3. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox