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In the world of Cloud Native applications and infrastructure, it is essential to ensure that the apps and infrastructure are designed, built and deployed in the best way possible.
Containers were designed to be stateless, meaning they are completely self-contained, holds only static data relevant to the specific function of the container itself, and allow for dynamic scaling and deployment without considerations of locality or underlying infrastructure. However, in a stateless environment, data persistence becomes a key challenge.
While it is possible to use CSI drivers to attach traditional storage to containers, the result is that the containers are no longer truly stateless. Utilizing the OpenServiceBroker (OSB) standard with the ECS Storage Broker, it becomes possible to provision object storage in native PaaS & Kubernetes environments, which for Kubernetes enables using standard Kubernetes methodologies and concepts, such as Kubernetes Secrets to store credentials.
The OSB Service Catalog and ECS Broker enables modern application developers to persist data externally on the Dell ECS object storage system, without considerations for where or how they deploy their apps, as they are no longer tied to a CSI provisioned block/file mount. Additionally, it allows for near unlimited scale in terms of capacity due to the inherent linear scale-out model of Dell ECS.
This document will function as a guide to installing both Service Catalog and the ECS Broker, while also show casing different provisioning methods as shown in figure 1.