EMC’s newest open-source project attempts to unify storage access for containers
The growing vendor support for containers is a double-edged sword. On one hand, users have access to an ever-broadening selection of complementary technologies, but on the other, the trend is making it difficult to keep up with the pace of change. The issue is particularly noticeable on the storage side, where EMC Corp. now hopes to simplify matters somewhat with a new open-source project.
Announced at this week’s MesosCon event in Denver, libStorage aims to serve as a unified data access layer for container clusters. The framework provides a programming interface that lets Dockerized services centrally interact with any supported storage system, including potentially arrays from both EMC and its rivals as well as cloud-based alternatives like Amazon S3. According to the company, the only requisite is a lightweight client that needs to be embedded in the container runtime.
The functionality spares developers the hassle of manually integrating their containers and storage infrastructure, which can noticeably speed up application projects. Moreover, EMC says that libStorage makes maintenance easier as well from there onwards, since services don’t have to be updated when the infrastructure on the other end of the API changes. As a result, the framework can be implemented with far fewer dependencies than the hard-coding approach requires, simplicity that stands to benefit vendors as well.
Making a storage system compatible with libStorage automatically provides interoperability with all most popular application platforms in the container ecosystem, including Cloud Foundry, Mesos and Kubernetes. Since it’s open-source, EMC’s tool will likely be extended to support even more management solutions and storage products in the future by vendors seeking to court container adopters. With enough support, it may very well become the de facto storage access layer for Docker.
Image via Wikimedia
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