When it comes to stateful versus stateless applications, the role of Kubernetes is changing.

As a container storage company, Portworx Inc. has found itself in a position to observe the evolution of Kubernetes and its use in the enterprise, because the company runs stateful containers in production with DevOps in mind. Stateful, which depends on persistent storage of key information for applications to run, is an important process because DevOps teams can run into all sorts of issues with stateful services, from security and support to data availability and automation.

The solution is to provide availability for the underlying storage. As a result, Portworx is witnessing a change within the DevOps world in how Kubernetes is viewed and managed.

“Enterprises are recognizing that stateful apps should be using and can be using Kubernetes,” said Murli Thirumale (pictured, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Portworx. “Kubernetes is going to move from managing applications to managing infrastructure like storage. Most people used to think of it as in the cloud and stateless, but now it’s on-premises and stateful.”

Thirumale spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, California. He was joined by Satish Puranam (pictured, right), technical specialist (Kubernetes and PCF) at Ford Motor Co., and they discussed Ford’s use of Portworx’s technology and the latest release of a Kubernetes backup solution (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Cost-efficient storage

Ford is a Portworx customer, and the automotive company has been working with Thirumale’s firm to help drive cost efficiency in the management of its data storage structure, according to Puranam.

“All of the things that are cloud native are great, but cloud native has state somewhere and that has to be managed someplace,” Puranam said. “We asked whether we could do that with Kubernetes. It’s a journey that ultimately led us to Portworx.”

On Tuesday, Portworx announced an update that enables companies to run, scale, backup and recover critical apps on Kubernetes. With PX-Backup, a point-and-click recovery solution for Kubernetes apps, enterprise users can redeploy information using a standard Kubernetes deployment file.

“Stateful is almost easier than stateless now because we have these extensions of Kubernetes,” Thirumale said. “We run on top of the underlying hardware, but then we’re enabled to work with all of the orchestration that Kubernetes provides.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Portworx Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Portworx nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE