Introduction to Storage for Containers

Containers and related technologies allow to manage computational resources at fine granularity, increase the pace of software development, testing, and deployment, and at the same time improve the efficiency of infrastructure utilization. Recognizing these benefits, many enterprises are upgrading their technology by incorporating containers in their infrastructure and workflows.

As containerization technologies enter enterprise market they meet new functional demands. Providing and managing persistent, highly-available, yet nimble storage is a particularly important requirement. A number of new and existing companies and open-source projects are aggressively entering this arena. We expect that in the coming years the demand for professionals who are fluent in storage for containers will rise dramatically.

In our tutorial we plan to cover all major topics of storage for containers. We will first describe the structure of Docker's layered images, its local CoW-based storage, and Docker registry. We will then present the concept of persistent volumes and dynamic provisioning in Kubernetes. As part of the tutorial, we will use the insights and examples that we accumulated while working on adapting IBM's Spectrum Scale for containerization environments.