Newest feature of scalable container orchestration platform Amazon ECS, enables Portworx cloud native storage to power mission critical databases
Portworx, the cloud native storage company modern enterprises trust to manage data in containers, today announced that Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) has integrated with its flagship product PX-Enterprise, 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. Following Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) integration with PX-Enterprise earlier this year, Amazon customers have unparalleled choice when it comes radically simplified operations of containerized stateful services running anywhere on the Amazon Web Services platform.
Containers have redefined how today’s leading enterprises build and deploy applications, automate operations and cut costs through improved resource utilization. As container adoption accelerates, however, to include mission critical stateful services like databases, enterprises have discovered a need for a cloud native storage solution that provides HA, backups, snapshots, encryption, auto-scaling and monitoring integration to successfully manage stateful containerized applications. The combination Amazon ECS scaleable container platform and Portworx persistent storage provides enterprises with an easy-to-manage container environment no matter what their scale.
When customers effectively use Portworx cloud native storage to containerize stateful services, the effects can be dramatic. According to Rhett Dillingham of Moor Insights & Strategy, “Portworx’s unique storage solution delivers the availability, performance, and features necessary to minimize stateful application operations costs which, can easily exceed $1 million per year across staff and support contracts. These capabilities can also reduce compute infrastructure costs for some workloads by 40-60 percent for savings that can grow to more than $1 million per year. Most importantly, improved revenue growth from an optimal customer experience and increased developer productivity can also be achieved, although they are more difficult to quantify in impact (Moor Insights & Strategy, Rhett Dillingham, The Business Value of Portworx PX Enterprise, Aug 2018)”.
“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.”
Combining the benefits of Amazon ECS with Portworx’s cloud native storage, enterprises now have access to:
- Multi-AZ EBS for Containers – Teams can flexibility deploy Docker containers within and across Availability Zones based on their 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: Portworx users now have access to daemon scheduling, which allows users to 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 – Enterprises have all the benefits of auto-scaling groups (ASGs) without data loss. Portworx itself manages the 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 – Enterprises have the benefits of EC2 instance storage for ECS without data loss, so if the EC2 instance serving the database pod goes down, 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.