Cross-Cloud Disaster Recovery (DR), Improved Performance and Lower Cost with Ultima Data Plane on AWS

Diamanti Spektra 3.0, a finalist in the CRN annual Tech Innovator Awards, is the industry’s first and only multi-cluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes platform with integrated support for operating and managing stateful applications. In Spektra 3.0, customers were able to provision and manage Diamanti and Azure Kubernetes clusters. Additionally, Diamanti Ultima offload capabilities that improve the performance of data-intensive applications, avoid overprovisioning of resources, and assure guaranteed performance was available on Diamanti clusters.

One of the common requests from the customers has been to have Diamanti Ultima capabilities on the cloud-based infrastructure (e.g. Azure, AWS) as well. So in Spektra 3.1 release, we are introducing Ultima data plane capabilities on the AWS cluster. This allows Diamanti to provide a cloud-based bare-metal container platform with nearly the same storage benefits in AWS that we can provide on Diamanti on-premises clusters. This new support for AWS is particularly significant because it allows AWS customers to make use of higher performance local NVMe drives on EC2 instances in a fault-tolerant manner, have full Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities, achieve higher performance, and lower cost per IOPS.

AWS Cluster Creation, Deployment, and Migration:

Customers can create AWS clusters from Spektra UI, assign them to the projects, and deploy stateful and stateless applications on the AWS clusters. During the AWS cluster creation, customers can choose the region for the AWS cluster as well as the instance type for both the control plane and worker nodes. Customers who want to take advantage of Diamanti storage capabilities on AWS clusters are required to select the worker node pools with the ‘Ultima’ label. 

Once the AWS cluster is created, customers can assign the cluster to the project and deploy both stateful and stateless applications on the AWS cluster. They also have the option to migrate the applications between AWS and Diamanti clusters as well as between 2 AWS clusters. Please check out the following video to better understand AWS cluster creation, application deployment, and migration workflows:


Disaster Recovery(DR):

In Spektra 3.0, we added support for Disaster Recovery (DR) between 2 on-premises Diamanti clusters. Starting Spektra 3.1, customers can also enable Disaster Recovery (DR) between AWS and on-premises clusters to improve fault tolerance and eliminate single points of failure. To set up a Disaster Recovery (DR) for any applications, the customer has to select the source cluster, destination cluster, and the replication period.

Figure 1: Enable Disaster Recovery using Diamanti Spektra

 

Once the initial replication between the source and destination cluster is completed, the customer can failover the application from the source cluster to the destination cluster with a simple click of a button.

Figure 2: Seamlessly failover/failback applications between AWS and on-premises clusters

 

Ultima Data plane support on AWS is particularly significant because it allows customers to make use of higher performance local NVMe drives on EC2 instances in a fault-tolerant manner to get full Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities, achieve higher performance, and lower cost per IOPS. Ultima also lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) by avoiding or minimizing certain cloud provider charges for backup, data protection, disaster recovery, and multi-zone availability capabilities.

Observability:

Customers can check AWS cluster level stats, application-level stats as well as application-level activity from a single pane of glass.

Figure 3: Track AWS cluster-level statistics

 

Figure 4: Track application-level statistics

 

Figure 5: Track application-level activity

 

In the Spektra UI, customers can check CPU, Memory, Storage, Network, IOPS-R, and IOPS-W Utilization as well as check the recent activity for the application and pod level logs to diagnose any issue quickly and reduce the Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

To summarize, with the introduction of Ultima data plane support on AWS, customers are able to take advantage of Diamanti Ultima capabilities on AWS cluster and achieve higher performance, greater fault tolerance, and lower cost per IOPS. In the upcoming releases, we will expand the support for Ultima Data plane on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Azure clusters so that customers can take advantage of Diamanti Ultima capabilities irrespective of their preferred cloud vendor. 

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