There was no shortage of automation utilities for Docker by the time Rancher Labs Inc. joined the fray earlier this year with $10 million in funding from investors. But they provided little in the way of interoperability, requiring organizations to manually cobble them together into improvised management toolchains that its namesake framework offers to replace with an integrated set of controls brought together under a unified interface. The latest addition to the roster is a persistent storage service that is bound to make some waves in the container ecosystem.

By default, Docker instances hold their data internally, an arrangement that makes moving them around convenient but can become problematic in large deployments that are updated upwards of dozens of times a day. The rapid pace at which code is produced leaves no time to individually patch every container, requiring new iterations to be simply dropped into place, an approach that first requires deleting the previous incarnation and all the information inside. That’s unacceptable for the majority of cloud services that store details like login credentials and financial information on a permanent basis.

The new functionality that has been added to Rancher allows users to relegate such important data to a standalone pool located on a dedicated storage system such as EMC Corp.’s Gluster or Ceph, a popular choice among OpenStack adopters. The framework takes advantage of the designated service’s native capabilities for advanced management tasks like replicating files across multiple data centers and employs its own monitoring functionality to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

The feature provides an attractive alternative to the manual volume provisioning mechanism in Docker, which doesn’t lend itself particularly well to large clusters with too many instances to manage by hand.  Bundling storage controls into the same package as all its other management capabilities enables Rancher to spare administrators the trouble of individually maintaining the components that make up their automation toolchains. When an update is available, they can simply patch the entire framework without worrying about how a change to one tool might cause problems with another.

Image via Huskyherz