Accelerating Innovation with Stateful Containers
Key Points
- Organizations prioritize “speed to market” by building the simplest, fastest solutions with the highest chance of success.
- A forward‑thinking firm chose a hybrid‑cloud strategy that deploys all critical apps and data via containers, balancing both stateless and stateful workloads.
- For stateful containers, five key requirements are emphasized, starting with persistent storage that can handle structured, file‑based, or unstructured data across blob, file, or object stores.
- The architecture must preserve application configuration and ensure consistent behavior when moving workloads between on‑premises and cloud environments, enabling rapid scaling, mobility, and temporary container lifecycles.
Full Transcript
# Accelerating Innovation with Stateful Containers **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiCK6_jZigo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiCK6_jZigo) **Duration:** 00:12:26 ## Summary - Organizations prioritize “speed to market” by building the simplest, fastest solutions with the highest chance of success. - A forward‑thinking firm chose a hybrid‑cloud strategy that deploys all critical apps and data via containers, balancing both stateless and stateful workloads. - For stateful containers, five key requirements are emphasized, starting with persistent storage that can handle structured, file‑based, or unstructured data across blob, file, or object stores. - The architecture must preserve application configuration and ensure consistent behavior when moving workloads between on‑premises and cloud environments, enabling rapid scaling, mobility, and temporary container lifecycles. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiCK6_jZigo&t=0s) **Accelerating Innovation with Hybrid Cloud Containers** - The speaker outlines how a forward‑thinking company leverages hybrid‑cloud architecture and containerization—balancing stateful and stateless workloads—to maximize speed‑to‑market, mobility, and rapid, disposable compute resources. ## Full Transcript
organizations today that are looking to
be competitive fast-moving Etc know one
really important thing and that is speed
to Market what the market is looking for
is for organizations to build the
fastest simplest thing that they can
that's going to have the highest
probability of success let's take a look
at a Forward Thinking company one who's
looking to rethink the way that they do
Innovation one who's really thought long
and hard about not just the kind of
architecture they want to put in place
hybrid Cloud but also the way that they
want to deploy applications and data
this particular organization has decided
that they really want to take full
advantage of speed and have as such
decided that they are going to deploy
all of their critical applications and
data sets via
containers they know that there are some
applications that they have that are
going to be stateful in nature we're
going to focus on on those but there'll
also be different application Stacks
that they'll run that may be stateless
as well so as they think about the kind
of hybrid Cloud architecture that
they're looking to deploy they have to
keep in mind that the architecture needs
to support the statefulness of the data
set the configuration of the container
and the overall architecture of the
hybrid Cloud platform it's running on as
well as enable for Speed and Mobility
those stess containers that need to just
pop up to do some work and then they can
disappear after it's over whenever we're
talking about stateful containers one of
the things that we have to think about
and there are actually five of them are
just the very first and the simplest
service that any stateful container
requires which is the ability to be
persistent so as the container itself
lives and breathes it amasses data as
it's processing information and taking
inputs from the users that support it
this particular company may do online
retailing for example and they know that
there are certain applications that will
benefit from having the persistence by
which the information that's stored will
be available the next time the
application is started they also know
that the data will be placed on the most
efficient storage platform within the
cluster itself that it's capable of
working with data sets whether they are
stored in blog storage file storage or
in object storage in other words is the
data structured in nature that it can be
inter intersected with a row and a
column um is it file based or is it
something that's completely semi or
unstructured in nature and has no
addressable row and column intersection
all of these kinds of considerations the
container and its persistence needs to
be able to
maintain not just that but also the
configuration of the application itself
so that if the application needs to move
from the on print location to the cloud
then that consistency that experience
that you're looking to maintain at a
consistent way transfers with the
application it could also be in a hybrid
Cloud manner that the application maybe
it runs in the cloud and it's accessing
parts of its data set on Prem some parts
in a completely different Cloud
environment and maybe some parts in the
cloud that the application is running on
this idea of persistence allows the
application to know exactly where it was
at the last point the user interacted
with it and it has the underlying
services that address the storage
requirements whether that's snapshotting
backups provisioning expanding
Contracting encrypting all of the things
that a persistent storage container
would need to be able to provide for the
application that's running in a stateful
way now speaking of persistence the
other thing that this particular company
needs to keep in mind is
resiliency
I mentioned a couple of times that the
application may run on Prim it may run
in the cloud it may run and across
multiple clouds a combination thereof
the ability to provide High availability
of the application itself is a component
of resiliency should the application
fail this approach or these Services
would allow the application to quickly
be restarted to minimize the amount of
downtime and to certainly mitigate any
data loss we often refer to that as data
breaches so the notion of resiliency
isn't about just the application in the
container it's also about the prevention
of breaches of that information so for
example maybe I typed um you know an RM
star. star at the root level of my
particular container host well be great
if I could get that back without having
to reload the application and start all
over from scratch and go and try to find
that data set itself so this notion of
being being able to be resilient isn't
just about the application it's not just
about the data it's also the resiliency
services that are necessary to prevent
data loss from accidental activities and
to certainly make it so that the
application can quickly be restarted so
that there's no downtime Associated by
the enduser who's taking full advantage
of the application itself now after
resiliency it stands to reason that we
also need to be considerate of security
open up any web browser go to any news
site and I'm sure you'll find no
shortage of stories that are associated
with a service that was disrupted by
some threat actor or some nefarious
state who's trying to do things that
they should not be doing and so the idea
of security here is how do we prevent
the threat actors from getting into the
system to begin with this is where we
take full advantage of services that are
baked into the platform that the
container is running on to protect the
data in the application in the event
that there is some kind of an attack
there's a rapid response that you can
put into place even before the response
A system that allows you to detect
activity that might be occurring on the
network that could be indicative of a
threat attack itself to correlate that
Network related activity with what's
happening to the data especially the
relationship between the host and the
actual data source itself for example if
a host has normally been sending data in
the clear and all of a sudden it starts
encrypting the information well that
could be one of two things it could be
that we've just changed our security
policy and we've turned on host side
encryption it could also mean that the
host has been impacted by some kind of a
threat that seeks to um not just maybe
encrypt the data but maybe even to
exfiltrate the information
itself now correlation becomes critical
here so the ability to ask the other
parts of the platform for which this
container is running on top of if
they're seeing indicative signs of
different kinds of threat activities
would allow us to remove the false
positives so the security components
here that are protecting the data
snapshotting backup and Recovery
traditional backup and Recovery tools
are complemented now by the activities
that are monitoring and trying to detect
as well as services that allow us to
repair any kind of damaged information
automate the response if you will of an
attack so that the recovery activities
follow the defined runbook that you've
set forward and they recover in an
autonomous fashion or manual if that's
the route that you want to go all of the
services that you see listed right here
surrounding this container that I've got
drawn in the middle need to be able to
follow the container and the underlying
data wherever it resides whether it's on
Prem in the cloud across clouds or some
combination of all of
that
the key to Mobility is consistency being
able to package all of the things up
that I just said that are defined as
policies that complement the container
and the underlying data so that wherever
this resides it has the exact same
experience that's delivered in the
destination that you're trying to drive
it to Mobility is not just a one-way
location or a one-way uh form of
Transport if you will bidirectional
Mobility is what's critical here
especially when you're talking about
applications that are designed designed
in vehicles that really support a hybrid
Cloud
architecture that same experience that
we might have inside of a public cloud
or some kind of cloud hosted location
means that the application that I might
have up
here in the cloud will have all of the
same capabilities that we've listed
already the persistence the actual
resiliency the security and now the
mobility that b directional Mobility
that we're talking about means that as
the application moves from an on Prim
environment all the way up to the cloud
it should be able to move in the exact
same manner back to the host on
Prem now that's a really critical
concept because the last thing you want
to do is create and develop up in the
cloud environment and then be stuck
there because you can't get the
application out there happens to be one
or two services that are running up
there that aren't running on Prem so
when you think about the kind of
platform that you want to build this
particular container architecture on top
of it needs to be able to run as
application stack running on Hardware uh
or as a software stack that's running up
inside of the cloud
itself so we've talked a lot about what
we've done with the container itself we
also want to make sure that the
container has access to the actual
storage um data sets that it actually
needs to use to be
successful
so the last thing that any Forward
Thinking organization is going to be
thinking about is how do I make sure
that the applications that I'm running
in my container platform have access to
all of the data sets that are available
to it that it should have access to
provided to it in a way for which it's
been enriched and it's been cataloged
meaning I know where the data is I know
what the data contains and I know the
degrees of relevance and value it has to
the organiz ation and this particular
application I can use that cataloging to
affect policies how often it gets backed
up who has access through different
kinds of control measures authentication
and authorization considerations could
be baked into that I can set governance
and maybe regulatory policies Based on
data contained within the catalog such
as how good this data is uh and can be
used for as well as who has access to it
can it even go to the cloud or does it
have to stay on Prem all of these things
really make the overall containerization
experience of an application not only
consistent but also more relevant to the
organization it creates higher degrees
of accuracy within the application
because it has access to all of the data
it's supposed to regardless of where the
data is stored in the organization and
in the format it may be stored in
remember these containers and the
applications that they support need to
be be able to access data that could be
stored on block based systems on file
based systems and on object based
systems as well that notion of creating
the experience that's consistent on Prim
means that you're going to make specific
decisions in your containerized
architecture that effectively deploy
Cloud architectures on premise to where
the storage the compute and the
networking simply become services that
are almost invisible just like they are
in the cloud they're certainly there the
container need them and we can use
policies to adjust the kinds of
performance requirements that that
particular application demands and the
container environment requires to
support that application experience as
we need to within the cluster that we've
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