MapR Recently Announced MapR Data Fabric For Kubernetes To Allow Organizations To More Efficiently Containerize Apps

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Organizations are rapidly moving processing to and across a cloud infrastructure and pursuing containerization to increase utilization and flexibility of applications within their own data centers. There are many challenges with containerizing applications, particularly applications that are stateful and that share data. MapR Technologies recently announced MapR Data Fabric for Kubernetes to address these challenges and allow organizations to more efficiently containerize apps and take advantage of cloud infrastructures.

We interviewed Jack Norris, Senior Vice President, Data & Applications, MapR Technologies, to learn more.

Q: Can you explain what Kubernetes is?

A: Kubernetes is fast becoming the container orchestration and management de facto standard and offers many benefits.

Leading public cloud vendors enable many aspects of services on Kubernetes. Kubernetes manages and orchestrates containers but does not organically offer all of the aspects required for an organization to successfully deploy in production. The MapR integration with Kubernetes can enable customers to successfully deploy all applications in containers.

Q: Tell us about the MapR Data Fabric for Kubernetes and its benefits to customers?

A: Docker and Kubernetes only address a minor percentage of total applications. They struggle to support stateful applications that require persisted data. Containers, by nature, are stateless which is a term to indicate that Containers retain knowledge of data only during its lifecycle.

MapR changes all that by enabling Kubernetes to support the containerization of all applications. We provide a unique advantage for our customers by providing a Data Fabric that extends to support high volume and variety of data to support disparate applications from on-premise to across clouds.

By containerizing applications and not tying them to specific servers, organizations can increase utilization and agility by increasing utilization and easily moving jobs to optimize for cost, performance or compliance.

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Q: How is this different from what other vendors are doing with container technology and Kubernetes?

A: MapR provides an underlying data fabric that complements the containers. Containers provide flexibility and agility for applications that can be moved anywhere. MapR provides a data fabric to enable applications to access shared data regardless of where it moves. Other vendors are providing solutions but these have either scale limitations, require different access for different types of data, cannot stretch to accommodate multiple locations or hybrid clouds. MapR provides a single solution that addresses all of these issues. It is built on the foundation of scale, high availability, and versatility in hosting different types of applications and across different environments.

MapR also addresses requirements for production deployments, starting with high availability, policy-driven data governance, security and disaster recovery.

Q: What is most important feature and/or benefit of this new release?

A: Support for stateful applications makes it easier for organizations to deploy containers for production uses in which persistent access to data is critical. While container technology has become widely adopted at many organizations, the challenge is, containers were designed to be ephemeral, meaning that they can’t shut down, restart and pick up where they left off without modification.

The MapR Data Fabric now includes a natively integrated Kubernetes volume driver to provide persistent storage volumes for access to any data ­–­ including databases, files and streaming data – regardless of location. The platform supports data synchronization and integrity across zones for availability purposes, and customers can easily move containers across clouds for cost or performance reasons.

Q: What else should organizations know about container technology and MapR?

A: Containerization and Kubernetes also provide a foundation for new application development with microservices. MapR not only makes microservice adoption easy, but the platform also enables the integration of machine learning into microservices and the ability to share data science projects in containers.

The MapR Data Fabric for Kubernetes can assist with an enterprise organization’s journey with containers and delivers a powerful impact on day-to-day business that will have a long-standing benefits.