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Zesty Unveils Zesty Disk for Kubernetes, Providing DevOps with Elastic Storage for Dynamic Kubernetes Workloads

Zesty announced the release of Zesty Disk for K8s. This dynamic block storage auto-scaler can now be applied to K8s clusters to right-size EBS volumes, improve application stability, and reduce storage costs by up to 70% - all while relieving engineers of the burden of managing volumes. 

The functionality of K8s, an open-source container orchestration tool, significantly eases the process of provisioning EBS volumes. Ordering a specified disk size for containers is a challenge. The process, which involves specifying the GB size, requires constantly monitoring the volume to ensure there is enough space at any given moment, otherwise, the stability of running workloads may be compromised. This challenge is further compounded in cloud environments that have hundreds or thousands of running pods, as is typical for many applications.

K8s, which are often used to orchestrate very large workloads associated with databases, ETLs, and Machine Learning pipelines, have high data ingestion requirements that can unexpectedly overwhelm standard EBS volumes. When this happens, an application may slow down dramatically or crash due to an "out of disk error" - both significantly impacting the user experience.

Zesty Disk is ideal for any K8 workload, as its ability to scale storage volume means it can be applied to both relatively simple tasks as well as workloads that involve intense and dynamic disk usage. DevOps engineers like to use templates as a best practice to deploy, manage, and duplicate environments in order to standardize provisioning for infrastructure. However, each environment is different; it is unlikely that the disk size in one development environment will also be needed in production. Furthermore, DevOps is never linear, and as the technology implemented evolves, changes are constantly required, making it necessary to regularly monitor and right-size disk volumes.

By utilizing Zesty Disk's enhanced EBS storage, volumes will automatically expand and shrink according to real-time application needs, eliminating the need to manually adjust or predict volume size. Automatic expansion of volume ensures that when a huge data influx occurs, it won't impact the container's stability or lead to downtime for an app. Conversely, automatic reduction of volume saves a significant amount of money and other resources as it eliminates the need to over-provision excess file system capacity and provides the unique ability to downscale following a large data influx. 

Zesty's solution is integrated into a building block of K8s called Persistent Volumes. Volume elasticity is enabled by decoupling large file system volumes into a series of multiple volumes that are added or removed on the fly without interrupting the running pod. 

Published Friday, May 20, 2022 1:20 PM by David Marshall
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