Ondat and SUSE Rancher – run your stateful applications everywhere

SUSE GUEST BLOG ARTICLE AUTHORED BY:

Rodney Karemba, Customer Solutions Architect, Ondat

Stateful applications are essential to your business, and you need to ensure that your Kubernetes landscape is up to the task of supporting them.  Bringing together the Ondat data plane with SUSE Rancher enables enterprises to design, deploy, and manage robust, multi-cloud Kubernetes landscapes along with scalable, highly available, and performant persistent storage. ~ Terry 

SUSE Rancher and Ondat – Enable your multi-cloud Kubernetes strategy

In many organizations, multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments are inevitable, preferable, or both. There are large global operations that have simply evolved, over time, across multiple platforms; users might be leveraging hybrid environments to reduce costs in any number of ways; it could be that applications demand a modern edge/core architecture; or increasingly, that savvy organizations are choosing to hedge their bets, avoid lock-in to a single platform, shop around and increase their leverage when negotiating with suppliers.

One of the compelling benefits of Kubernetes is to provide a common container orchestration environment across disparate, underlying platforms: build your containerized applications once and run them anywhere.  And in many ways, Kubernetes is evolving beyond container orchestration to become a broader, common API for a distributed estate of heterogeneous infrastructure.  But, as ever in the IT industry, the reality for both platform/operations teams and developers is that the standard is far from unified.

As enterprise vendors and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have added platform-specific tools, features, practices, management and developer interfaces, the unified vision for Kubernetes has been eroded. The reality becomes a series of platform-specific Kubernetes enclaves: where overarching management and the movement of developers, ops teams, and applications between them becomes complex and costly.

SUSE has built a strong industry reputation for delivering enterprise-hardened, open and interoperable solutions, and SUSE Rancher is designed to address this problem for Kubernetes.  Rancher delivers unified Kubernetes management to help organisations accelerate digital transformation, providing consistent operations, workload management, and enterprise-grade security – from core to cloud to edge.

With SUSE Rancher, operations teams can easily manage multi-cluster and multi-cloud Kubernetes environments.  Rancher delivers streamlined cluster operations, full visibility and monitoring, and unified security and governance.  Rancher supports any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution, including AKS, EKS, and GKE, ensuring that platform and continuity engineers can design Kubernetes landscapes that are truly resilient and flexible to meet their business requirements.

The strength and relevance of what SUSE Rancher offers are why we at Ondat are so proud and excited about our joint capability.  Because, ever since users started building stateful applications on Kubernetes, persistent volumes and storage have been problematic.

Whether leveraging on-prem storage arrays or CSP storage services, the underlying storage has been an impassable chasm in the quest for a genuinely unified and unfettered Kubernetes experience.

For developers, basic elements like storage classes have been different across platforms.  Infrastructure-as-code, GitOps and Kubernetes operators for popular applications need to be amended for each different platform.  And developers need to know this issue exists to avoid hours of fruitless debugging.

And for the platform team, someone has to create all those different storage classes to accommodate developer needs across disparate underlying infrastructure.  This often involves painstakingly integrating external storage services (with incompatible security schemas) into the Kubernetes environment.  The resulting confusion often leaves them fielding developer inquiries and defeats the whole point of DevOps to streamline deployment and accelerate development.

Try building cluster resiliency across multiple availability zones, using snapshots, and implementing data encryption-at-rest; it’s going to be different everywhere you go, and in some places, it is going to be impossible.

You might think that department execs, product owners, and management are impervious to these concerns, but you would be wrong.  When simple tasks take days and projects are delayed, when all the nuanced technical differences between platforms elevate the risk of things going wrong – resulting in application downtime, service outage, and data loss – the consequences can be dire.

Ondat delivers the same fast, resilient, Kubernetes-native data services on the node, wherever your application workload is running.  For operators and platform engineers, Ondat makes storage simple to set up and even simpler to manage.  And like SUSE Rancher, Ondat does not skimp on features.

Quite the opposite, Ondat adds value to platform-specific storage and even lets cloud users leverage lower-cost services in the process.  Ondat delivers resilience to fast, low-cost, node storage, enabling highly available storage services even on platforms where this isn’t an option.  With topology aware placement, encryption at rest and in transit, and snapshots – tasks available through simple checkbox options in the user interface – Ondat removes the complexity from Kubernetes storage management.

Ondat and SUSE Rancher are an unmatched solution for managing and operating Kubernetes across multi-cluster, multi-cloud and hybrid IT infrastructure.  This not only impacts operational efficiency, but also enhances observability, simplifies policy and governance and strengthens application security.  Working in combination, these solutions create the unified environment needed to mitigate risk, conflict and confusion, and to capture the full efficiency of DevOps, GitOps and CI/CD pipelines.

Together, Ondat and SUSE empower enterprises to capture the full benefits of their infrastructure – whether on-prem or in the cloud or a combination of the two.  Application availability, security, scalability and flexibility are all essential drivers in digital transformation.  Leveraging SUSE Rancher with Ondat delivers concrete improvements in all these areas, while allowing customers to simultaneously reduce costs and retain independence and ongoing freedom of choice around cloud and platform providers.

Ready to learn more?

Check out our getting started guide and the companion demonstration video , then join us for a live SUSE One Partner Solutions Showcase webinar on Tuesday, 24 May 2022, at 5pm CEST / 11am EDT / 8am PDT – register here.

SUSE One Partner Solution Stacks are featured, co-innovations that help arm organizations to address a broad spectrum of challenges.  Solution Stacks can be leveraged by SUSE One Partners of all specializations and tiers to deliver unique value to our clients.  SUSE One partners can learn more and access resources for this and other solution stacks through the Partner Portal.