Containers are radically changing the way apps are built, shipped, deployed and integrated. Using containers, users can bring up an entire application stack in minutes and scale it horizontally or vertically to suit their needs. Frameworks like Kubernetes, Docker and Mesos have developed the right knobs to unleash the power of containers and solve the challenges associated with them. But the main focus of these frameworks to date has been on stateless apps. This focus is changing and there is tremendous effort in progress to extend the existing capabilities to stateful apps or so called data tier apps. But it is still early.

We at Datawise.io (now Diamanti) , believe that your data tier should just work. Our technology addresses the problems faced by stateful apps when it comes to managing its data. Our choice of framework for managing containers as of now is Kubernetes and we are encouraged by the recent opening of APIs and extensibility by Docker and Mesos. We are working to extend our technology to them.

Kubernetes has added support for persistent volumes in order to support data tier apps. Persistent volumes allow apps to store and manage their data in their favorite storage backend. But, the variety of backends supported today are limited and there is no easy way to add support for new backends or enhance the existing ones. We realized this is a challenge and joined the Kubernetes community to provide a flexible way to add support for new backends or enhance existing ones. It is with this the idea of FlexVolume was born.

Flexible volume is just not another Kubernetes volume plugin. It enables vendors to develop their own backend drivers or extend their capabilities. Refer to pull request for more details: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/13840. At Datawise.io (now Diamanti) , FlexVolume is enabling us to expose the full strength of our technology to apps.

Please check back for more details on our technology in upcoming blog posts.

Enjoy your Application st[n]ack