MapR Technologies, Inc., which provides a converged data platform, has introduced persistent storage for containers with complete state access to files, database tables, and message streams from any location.
The MapR Converged Data Platform for Docker includes the MapR Persistent Client Container (PACC) that enables stateful applications and microservices to access data for greater application agility and faster time-to-value.
As organizations move toward using container applications in production, they are struggling to achieve anything more complex than a stateless web application, according to MapR. The biggest hurdle today, the company says, is data persistence, because without it, applications cannot scale elastically to meet business requirements,
“The challenge being faced by a lot of people who want to use containers is that there isn’t really a good, scalable, out-of-the-box option for maintaining state. What MapR provides is not only our MapR Converged Data Platform as a persistent store, but also the PACC that is a predefined, extensible container in which you can plug in your existing or new applications and use MapR as the backend store,” said Dale Kim, senior director of industry solutions, MapR.
“This is about containerizing your operational applications. With all of these applications that are creating data, if you store it within MapR as the centralized repository, you also have Hadoop, Spark, and Drill as the analytics capabilities on that data,” said Kim. “And then, because MapR partners with cloud providers, you can deploy MapR across many different cloud vendors as well as on-premises and you have a complete story around hybrid cloud and intercloud.”
The MapR Converged Data Platform for Docker includes data storage for configuration, logging, and binary state; a scale-out NoSQL key/value and document database storage for operational and lightweight analytics; and global event streams with persistence for inter-microservice communication state.
The container-optimized environment with the new MapR PACC provides a pre-built Docker container that enables application access to files, database tables, and streams; extensible support for application layers; and availability in Docker Hub and as a Dockerfile for customizability.
“Within the PACC, you get security enabling authentication at a container level, so that any applications that you run at any given instance of container will only access the authorized data within MapR,” said Kim. “The other part of the security story is that the transmitted data is encrypted so that you have privacy in terms of communicating with MapR.”
Docker has emerged as the de facto standard for container technology for now “and that is why we started with them,” said Kim, who noted that some of the orchestration technologies such as Mesos and Kubernetes are also supported. “We work well with the systems that deploy the containers since we are simply the storage engine and help to simplify the aggregation of all that data that is created.”
For more information, go to the MapR Technologies website.