Pure Storage Accelerates Application Modernization With Robust Kubernetes and Cloud-Native Solutions

The rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies and Kubernetes has revolutionized application development and deployment. At Pure Storage Accelerate 2024, Shawn Rosemarin, VP of R&D Customer Engineering at Pure Storage, shed light on how Pure Storage is enabling organizations to accelerate their application modernization initiatives with a robust platform that bridges the gap between developer agility and IT control.

Embracing the Cloud-Native Future

According to Rosemarin, 80% of organizations plan to build new applications on cloud-native platforms over the next five years. Pure Storage is evolving its platform to support the unique storage requirements of cloud-native, microservices-based applications.

"As you think about solutions like Portworx and Cloud Block Store, what that does is give developers a better way to extend the plane of their infrastructure so that they can consume in the most simple way without having to worry about where that infrastructure lives," explained Rosemarin.

Simplifying Kubernetes Adoption

The shift from VMs to Kubernetes is accelerating, and Pure Storage offers specific capabilities to help IT teams manage this transition seamlessly. Rosemarin highlighted that while some organizations may choose to stay with VMware, Pure Storage can help optimize their VM environments and lower costs.

For new applications, Rosemarin emphasized the natural alignment with Kubernetes: "If you assume that most of what's being created are modern applications using a microservices type architecture, they naturally lend themselves to Kubernetes."

Pure Storage's Portworx solution acts as a sidecar to the growth of Kubernetes, providing a ubiquitous container storage interface (CSI) that abstracts away the complexities of underlying storage platforms.

Streamlining Hybrid Cloud Complexity

Managing containers at scale across hybrid cloud environments is a significant challenge for organizations. Pure Storage's solutions help abstract and simplify storage management in these dynamic environments.

"If you think about what we demonstrated in Pure1 today, if you're running storage on-premise and in the cloud, security runs on-prem and in the cloud. So when I'm looking at a problem or trying to diagnose an issue, I can now extend to the volumes sitting on the cloud as easily as on-prem," said Rosemarin.

Delivering Tangible Business Benefits

Standardizing on Pure Storage's platform yields benefits beyond cost savings and automation. Rosemarin highlighted the ability to scale efficiently, drive energy efficiency and sustainability, and accelerate time to value.

"Many of these organizations have also driven the inherent benefit of being able to provision workloads faster, to get to time-to-value faster," noted Rosemarin. "Rather than this project coming online in nine months, we talk in the engineering world about monthly release builds. Removing storage as an impediment allows me to essentially accelerate time to value."

Balancing Developer Agility and IT Control

Pure Storage recognizes the importance of striking the right balance between developer agility and IT control. Rosemarin emphasized the increasing adoption of object storage by developers, as it provides flexibility and simplicity through APIs.

"Developers like object stores because it is a protocol in S3 that gives them a lot more flexibility in what storage they need and how to get access to it," said Rosemarin. "They just want to be able to get what they need when they need it and be able to turn up and down performance."

Differentiating Through Architectural Innovation

While marketing messages may sound similar across storage vendors, Rosemarin asserted that Pure Storage's differentiation lies in its evergreen architecture and ability to deliver on its promises.

"You can try to copy as much as you want, but ultimately, when you think of the architecture that supports Evergreen, you think about the fact that our systems fundamentally do not require downtime to be upgraded, either by software or hardware upgrades, none of our competitors can effectively do that," stated Rosemarin.

Embracing Storage as a Service

As more workloads become containerized and cloud-native, Pure Storage's subscription model and SLAs are evolving to provide customers with the flexibility and predictability they need. Rosemarin cited Gartner's prediction that 80% of all storage will be consumed as a service by 2028.

"I do believe there is absolutely no reason to capitalize all these assets, especially if I don't know if I'm going to be using block, file, or object, on-prem or in the cloud, scale-up or scale-out, performance or latency IO ingest," said Rosemarin. "I don't know why I'm holding on to all of these things, not knowing what I want to use when I can have a storage platform that provides what I need when I need it."

Conclusion

Pure Storage is at the forefront of enabling organizations to modernize their applications and embrace the cloud-native future. With its robust Kubernetes integration, advanced data services, and flexible consumption models, Pure Storage empowers developers and IT teams to innovate faster while maintaining the necessary control and security.

As Rosemarin aptly put it, "Everything is now code, applications, or services. It's like, 'Can you get them to my data center or cloud when I need them? Can they be clean and ready?'" With Pure Storage, the answer is a resounding yes.