Portworx Release Its Open Source Kubernetes Scheduler Extender, STORK

Today Portworx released its new STorage Orchestrator Runtime for Kubernetes or STORK. According to the company, this new open-source project that takes advantage of the extensibility of Kubernetes to allow DevOps teams to run stateful applications like databases, queues and key-value stores more efficiently on Kubernetes. STORK provides key hyperconvergence, failure-domain awareness, storage health monitoring, and snapshot features for Kubernetes while being delivering through a plugin interface enabling it tow work with any storage driver for Kubernetes.

Today Portworx released its new STorage Orchestrator Runtime for Kubernetes or STORK. According to the company, this new open-source project that takes advantage of the extensibility of Kubernetes to allow DevOps teams to run stateful applications like databases, queues and key-value stores more efficiently on Kubernetes. STORK provides key hyperconvergence, failure-domain awareness, storage health monitoring, and snapshot features for Kubernetes while being delivering through a plugin interface enabling it tow work with any storage driver for Kubernetes.

Containers and the use of Kubernetes are growing at an impressive rate. There are still some issues and limitations to running stateful apps on Kubernetes in production. To help with this, STORK allows stateful applications to take advantage of scheduler extenders. Making sure that STORK can address operational issues, Portworx collaborated with customers that run large scale stateful applications in production.

Benefits and features include:

• Maintaining hyperconvergence during failover: STORK enables the seamless deployment of complex distributed stateful applications by implementing a Kubernetes scheduler extender that influences pod scheduling based on the location of volumes that a pod requires. So even after failure events, pods are scheduled on hosts that already have a copy of data, ensuring ongoing hyperconvergence.
• Failure domain awareness: STORK automatically manages anti-affinity to enforce scheduling of pods across failure domains.
• Health monitoring of storage plugins: STORK does this by failing over pods when the storage driver on a node goes into an error or unavailable state.
• Volume Snapshot support: STORK adds support for orchestrating volume snapshots through Kubernetes. This allows users to take snapshots of PVCs and then restore those snapshots to other PVCs all through Kubernetes. This allows users to automate complex data workflows, all through Kubernetes.

Portworx is welcoming contributions to STORK from the Kubernetes community. 

Portworx STORK on github

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