Cloud-native storage solutions for Kubernetes : A performance comparison

Abstract: Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that has been rising in popularity in recent years. The modular nature of Kubernetes allows the usage of different storage solutions, and for cloud environments, cloud-native distributed storage solutions maybe attractive due to their redundant nature. There are many tools for cloud-native distributed storage available on the market today with differing features and performance. Choosing the correct one for an organisation can be difficult. Organisations utilising Kubernetes in cloud environments would like to be as performance efficient as possible to save on costs and resources. This study aims to offer a benchmark and analysis for some of the most popular tools, to help organisations choose the ‘best’ solution for their operational needs, from a performance perspective. The benchmarks compare three cloud-native distributed storage solutions, OpenEBS, Portworx, and Rook-Ceph on both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). For a baseline comparison, the study will also benchmark the cloud providers own solutions; Azure Disk Storage, and Amazon Elastic Block Storage. The study compares these solutions from three key metrics; bandwidth, latency, and IOPS, in both read and write performance.