Containers and cloud native development processes are changing the way the enterprise thinks about data storage management.

With the current use of microservices, architecture planning is critically important, according to enterprise storage platform company Portworx Inc., a VMware Inc. partner. In fact, if organizations build architectures with forethought, then surprise escalations in scaling, as was the case early on during the pandemic, can take place without failures.

Amazon.com Inc. is one example of an organization that built architectures that scaled without problems, even during a pandemic, according to Michael Ferranti (pictured), vice president of product and corporate marketing at Portworx. “They actually created architectures that were able to withstand the massive increase in demand that they got,” he said.

Ferranti spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during theCUBE on VMworld event. They discussed the major enterprise computing trends observed at the recent VMworld event, particularly the necessities of proper architecture planning when it comes to microservices. (* Disclosure below.)

Microservices

Another, lesser well-known success story from early on during the pandemic was with the game platform Roblox Corp., which uses Portworx’s microservices-based architecture.

“They actually [launched an initial public offering] during the pandemic in the first week … they scaled in a single month what they had scaled in the entire previous year,” Ferranti said. “And the only way they were able to do that was with these modern architectures.”

Microservices make so much sense for many reasons, including scaling faster and going to market quicker, Ferranti explained. And security, data protection and data mobility are brought in from the start of the process.

In the old days, a company’s enterprise resource planning system would have to shut down for three days every six months for updates to roll out, but “that stuff is going away,” Ferranti said. And the same changes are happening with consumer products that are using microservices. “How often do any of us get a maintenance notification anymore from a consumer service that we use?” he added.

Independently updating microservices works without most of us even noticing, and microservices can update apps sometimes multiple times per day. Ferranti reckons the microservices advantages trickle right down to the developer level too, allowing developers to be more independent of each other.

“Have less dependencies, develop applications faster and get those products to market faster. It’s about building architectures that allow you to take advantage of this movement towards digital,” he stated.

Solutions to get there

VMware Tanzu, an application service for delivering cloud native containerized workloads and managing apps in production, is an example of a microservices container and Kubernetes solution that Ferranti says helps his customers get to microservices and, consequently, digitization.

“You know, folks don’t know how to do it. They need platforms that make it easy,” he said.

One of those platforms is the Portworx Enterprise platform, which integrates with VMware Tanzu, Ferranti explained.

Ferranti believes that a dedicated, scalable Kubernetes-oriented, end-to-end storage and data management solution, such as Portworx’s management of storage for containers, allows data protection and data security requirements to be more easily introduced. One reason is that a customer can run Tanzu over an on-premises data center along with a cloud footprint. That means moving databases around the different environments, which could be as simple as just making an on-prem database backup in the cloud.

“They get the ability to do those types of things, data protection, data mobility,” he explained. That’s because the solution is geared toward supporting Kubernetes infrastructures and addressing challenges natively for that platform. It’s container-optimized.

“And that has accelerated developer’s ability to build and run applications, especially with Kubernetes,” Ferranti concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE on VMworld event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for theCUBE on VMworld event. Neither VMware Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE