Container tech for stateful-stateless cloud apps

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

NetApp’s country manager for Malaysia and Brunei, Azrin Abd Shukor has noted a disconnect between types of applications that businesses and cloud platforms use.

He explained, “Most applications today are stateful due to being legacy. For example desktop applications and applications based on RDBMS (relational database management systems), are stateful, because (apps) always need to ‘remember’ what their last previous action data was before they can move forward.”

“However cloud technologies love stateless applications (which forget previous actions). It was built this way since day one.”

And, that’s where the disconnect is.

“This is something that needs to be addressed as the use of technology and cloud becomes more prevalent, and despite organisations having started their respective digital transformation journeys,” Azrin said.

Stateful vs stateless: The challenge for legacy and cloud applications

A good example of stateless apps are search engines. When you are done with a search session and close it, your previous actions are forgotten. You have to type your search request again when you re-open the search engine page.

So, the cloud loves stateless applications, and it was built on stateless infrastructure, Azrin said.

But, stateful applications are the more convenient type of apps to use. Not to mention, many legacy apps are stateful. It costs time and money to redevelop stateful apps as stateless apps that work better on cloud platforms.

So, a method that the technology world has derived to manage this, is the use of container technologies. Azrin explained, “Containers or instances of micro services, is actually a type of application. Micro services themselves can be stateful or stateless.

“Imagine a big box of many, many applications that talk to each other and that results in the main application that you and I as users, will use.”

It’s a highly complex scenario which would require orchestration for these very many and very minute processes to happen quickly and smoothly.

Azrin also shared that this is how a majority of the industry is addressing the scenario of the stateless cloud, and it is the reason why containers technologies have been so popular.

He described how a container can typically contain thousands upon thousands of micro services. There exist “highways’ that lead from these many micro services to the resources they require like compute and storage, be it on the cloud, or on-premise, or in multi-cloud environments.

It’s a highly complex scenario which would require orchestration for these very many and very minute processes to happen quickly and smoothly. Enter Kubernetes, a container orchestration technology that originated as a Google open source project.

The role of Kubernetes

Eric Han, NetApp’s VP of CDS Product Management for NetApp’s cloud portfolio has blogged about how his organisation is an early adopter of Kubernetes, a popular container orchestration technology.

“The promise of stateful applications in Kubernetes is the ability for an application, its data, and the data services associated with it to be moved across multiple public and private clouds. It means being able to develop and deploy applications anywhere and being able to change these applications over time.”

This requires an environment that brings together IT operations and application development (DevOps) so teams can rapidly develop and deploy.

NetApp kickstarted Project Astra in 2020, to work with the Kubernetes and developer community on building better patterns for container data management. The goal is to achieve true application portability and rich, high-performance workloads.

Azrin explained, “We’re still the largest single storage vendor in the world, because we only have one thing in mind, which is data, how to manage it, how to analyze it, how to store it for our customers.”

NetApp kickstarted Project Astra in 2020, to work with the Kubernetes and developer community on building better patterns for container data management. The goal is to achieve true application portability and rich, high-performance workloads.

NetApp’s experience and knowledge has enabled them to come up with tools that allow businesses and governments to manage their data.

Malaysia’s landscape for cloud applications

Besides sharing NetApp’s latest technology initiatives so businesses and governments can experience true application portability across any IT environment, Azrin offered a glimpse into what our public sector and business sector experienced during the start of the pandemic.

NetApp had implemented a disaster recovery plan somewhere around January, 2020, and were actually quite prepared for the lockdown.

There had already been a global discussion within the organisation about NetApp’s state of readiness, so by the time the country announced lockdown, Azrin stated they were pretty ready.

…part of the reason for their readiness, was due to them having addressed stateless/stateful applications pretty early on.

“We had our work-from-home facility up and running. We had all our applications, our sales operations, our marketing and all departments in a state of readiness to accommodate a workforce of 10,500 across 180 countries, working from home.”

Azrin also opined that part of the reason for their readiness, was due to them having addressed stateless/stateful applications pretty early on. As a result, their employees were able to access their work applications at home, with minimum hassle.

Sustainability with cloud during a pandemic period

Their readiness also enabled them to help their customers. “Locally, a lot of our customers were in a state of disarray and unsure of what needed to be done to move forward.”

Azrin also noted that during this time there was very minimal procurement projects awarded, and these were also focused mainly on mobile devices like notebooks, to equip civil service employees to work from home.

In fact, desktop virtualisation was on the rise, and questions about cloud applications by platforms from Azure to AWS, was on the rise.

Throughout all of these activities, the number one concern that customers had was sustainability. There was minimal spending for the first 6 to 8 months in Malaysia on IT infrastructure, but NetApp helped to ensure the health of existing infrastructure via maintenance and updates, for their customers.

This in large part is thanks to Active IQ, an AI-based digital advisor that monitors the health state of customer systems in real-time.

“Active IQ looks into the application, it looks into the performance workloads of all applications that sit in our storage. So, we are able to monitor and proactively advice customers when they need more IT resources,” NetApp’s country manager explained.

There was minimal spending for the first 6 to 8 months in Malaysia on IT infrastructure, but NetApp helped to ensure the health of existing infrastructure via maintenance and updates, for their customers.

Light at end of tunnel

Due to the work they have done last year, Azrin observed that corporations and the government sector are now ready to move to the next phase. “Now, we are ready to start looking into innovation and technologies that enhance their systems further.”

With Malaysia’s prime minister, announcing the country’s national digital economy blueprint, last February “..the timing is just perfect,” Azrin concluded.