Today at Container Summit, Datawise, the stealth company developing network and storage solutions for Linux containers, announced that its contributions for container networking and storage have been accepted for the upcoming release of Kubernetes, the open source container management system pioneered by Google and supported by leading open source vendors. Datawise's contributions bring powerful new networking and storage capabilities for developers, while also introducing vendor-agnostic APIs that allow a broader ecosystem of storage and networking vendors to manage containerized applications at scale without writing custom software and plug-ins.

As container adoption grows from developer sandboxes to production environments, developers face questions of how to best define performance requirements of applications, while operators must deliver existing networking and storage assets to container deployments at scale.

"While containers have greatly simplified the packaging of applications, they have also introduced new challenges for the data tier," said Mark Balch, Vice President of Products at Datawise. "Our contributions to Kubernetes 1.2 are a big breakthrough for how the Kubernetes community will bring the degree of networking and storage quality-of-service guarantees to the container world on bare metal that the industry has grown accustomed to with the virtual machine world."

Datawise's new FlexVolume contribution to Kubernetes 1.2 enables Kubernetes to automatically configure storage based on user-defined requirements.  Datawise's scheduler contribution enables the Kubernetes scheduler to  place workloads in optimal locations for storage and networking performance requirements, leveraging a declarative model leveraged by developers and container administrators. Whereas Kubernetes previously scheduled pods exclusively based on CPU and memory resources, but not networking or storage -- now Kubernetes brings many more extensibility options for delivering optimal networking and storage capabilities for containerized applications, as well as more closely working with underlying infrastructure.

Visit the Datawise booth at Container Summit on Wednesday, February 10 for a live demonstration of the Kubernetes contributions for network and storage.