StorageOS announced that the company has provided Civo with
persistent cloud native storage volumes to support its managed
Kubernetes services. Civo considered several storage vendors, including
OpenEBS, Portworx, and Rook. But StorageOS was ultimately selected
because it delivered on several essential MSP requirements -
performance, data safety, competitive pricing, and round-the-clock
support.
Using K3s,
Civo customers can launch a Kubernetes cluster in around 90 seconds
compared to the 20-30 minutes and substantial effort required with most
services. When a Civo customer launches a K3s cluster, the platform
spins up a series of virtual machine disks with cloud native storage
provided by StorageOS.
MSPs
like Civo require rapid storage resource deployment to meet customer
SLAs. Fast access to cloud native storage allows them to deliver
environments that can be safely deployed and destroyed at speed and at
scale. Without the capability to scale storage on demand, deployment
times can increase, clusters can fail, and customer applications can be
affected.
"When
we talk about performance and data safety, we're talking about the
strong replication, high availability, and failover that StorageOS
brings to the table," confirms Andy Jeffries,
CTO and co-founder at Civo. "StorageOS also demonstrated that their
team understood the unique way cloud and managed service providers
consume storage in terms of the vast number of volumes that are created
and deleted on a regular basis - and the accompanying elasticity that's
required to make that happen."
Before
working with StorageOS, if one of Civo's customers needed a database or
uploaded file storage, Civo had to manually create an instance and use
that as the backend storage. With StorageOS, it's a native component of
the deployment and - as such - happens automatically. StorageOS also
enables Civo to carry out maintenance and rolling upgrades of its
Kubernetes clusters, thanks to its replication function and transparency
when moving volumes between nodes.
"Civo
has the kind of offering that tests the limit of IT infrastructure and
container-based applications. The company is always hitting system
limits and bottlenecks - like distributed key value stores. We're always
keen to work with them and push these boundaries. Our team monitors how
close they're getting to the limits and, before they're hit, offer
advice on how to extend the capability so that it doesn't become a
bottleneck," explains Alex Chircop, Founder and CEO, StorageOS.
Civo
has written its own storage driver, which also utilises StorageOS. This
allows customers to create their own volumes of persistent storage. Andy Jeffries provides
some additional detail: "Using StorageOS in this way has allowed us to
reduce the price of our Kubernetes clusters - offering customers smaller
static disks on the instances and still giving them the ability to add
any size of volume they want to them. This means customers now pay for
what they use rather than resources they don't need. To that end, you
can buy a 1GB StorageOS volume attached to one of our Kubernetes
clusters for as little as $0.10 per month."
Civo's
target markets include small to medium-sized development teams that
need fast Kubernetes access for experimentation and testing, demos,
learning and training environments, and continuous integration or
delivery (CI/CD). The company also supports individual developers who
work for - or represent - larger enterprises, including Oracle, Walmart,
Verizon, Microsoft, and NetApp.
"As
a self-funded start-up, our biggest challenge has always been managing
the entire platform - including the storage component - with a
relatively small team. While it's true that we've grown over the last 18
months, we're still a lean operation, so we must rely heavily on
product automation and vendor support to make sure we continue to
deliver to our customers. StorageOS continues to support us and more
than pulls their weight in this regard. As such, we now consider the
company to be a key technical partner and a critical enabler for our
future growth and evolution," concludes Andy Jeffries.