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 .

In addition , Civo ’ s development team has been impressed with the strong product roadmap that StorageOS has in place and its willingness to engage openly with future product developments , noting that StorageOS is always open to discuss and understand what features it might need in the future .

Jeffries said : “ For a specialist managed service provider trying to break our way into a larger market segment , this kind of openness and transparency from a vendor is critical in planning our evolution and delivering new products .”

Civo has also written its own storage driver , which utilises StorageOS . This allows customers to create their own volumes of persistent storage . Jeffries provided 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 US $ 0.10 per month .

“ 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 its 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 .”

Jeffries told Intelligent SME . tech more about how the service has helped his company .

Can you give me an example of how a small or medium business development team would use your Kubernetes service ?

They often use our offerings to bring their staff up to speed with using Kubernetes . Our recently released survey analysis ( www . civo . com / blog / Kubernetes-in-2021 ) showed that the steep learning curve is one of the largest roadblocks to Kubernetes adoption . So , our speed of launch along with our open marketplace allows for staff to experiment and learn Kubernetes , while keeping costs down .

Tell me more about how StorageOS understands the unique way cloud and managed services providers consume storage .

A lot of cloud / container customers running persistent storage leave the storage in place for a relatively long time . Managed service providers such as Civo utilise persistent storage provided by StorageOS in a very different way with lots of volumes being created and destroyed each day as customers launch and destroy both Kubernetes clusters and persistent volumes within them . This frequency of resource creation and deletion can be very challenging in cluster-based systems .

Why does your kind of offering test the limits of IT infrastructure and container-based applications ?

There are lots of communication issues with large clustered systems running on a hyperconverged infrastructure , such as handling the creation of volumes located across multiple nodes with relatively concurrent writes for data resilience . Adding our frequency of creation and deletion is a real challenge for all parts of our Kubernetes supercluster-based stack and the storage subsystem .

How well does StorageOS work with your team ?

The StorageOS team has had a very close relationship with the Civo technical team since the very outset . Our first conversations were in person ( this was pre-COVID ) and it sent a team member to our site to work with us on a preorder proof of concept . Since then , we regularly talk about issues , roadmap and the general cloud-native and storage landscapes and we ’ ve always felt that they are 100 % ready to support us and work with us as we grow further . �

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Intelligent SME . tech