Author: Chris Engelbert
Showing 110 posts.
Chris Engelbert
Oct 12th, 2026 | 13 min read
Container-Native Storage: What the Category Actually Means, and Which Kind Survives a vSAN Exit
Three different storage architectures are sold under one category name. Container-ready hands an existing array to Kubernetes through a shim. Container-attached runs a replica engine per volume as pods. Container-native pools the capacity once and manages it as part of the cluster. They fail differently, they cost differently, and only one of them answers what a vSAN refugee is actually asking. Here is the condition that makes each one correct.
Chris Engelbert
Oct 4th, 2026 | 13 min read
vSphere 7 and 8 End of General Support: What the Date Actually Forces You to Decide About Storage
Pick your end-of-general-support date and count backwards. The hypervisor is not what moves slowly: a replacement host can be standing by in an afternoon. The storage tier is what cannot be moved in a maintenance window, what has to exist on both sides at once during a phased migration, and what every layer above it waits on. This is the sequence the date actually imposes, stage by stage, with the precondition, the check and the way back at each one.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 30th, 2026 | 12 min read
Clustered Storage After the vSAN Exit: What Open Source Gives You, and What You Then Operate
The licence line disappears and the operating line appears. Open source clustered storage is real software that runs real estates, but a vSAN replacement is not a procurement decision with a free option at the bottom of the list. It is a decision about which failures your platform team is now on the hook for. Here they are, in the order estates actually hit them, with what each one costs.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 27th, 2026 | 12 min read
The .vswp File Nobody Sized For: VM Swap Files and Datastore Capacity After the vSphere Exit
Power on a VM with 64 GB of configured memory and no reservation, and vSphere writes a 64 GB file to the datastore before the guest has finished booting. One per powered-on VM, reserved whether or not a single page is ever swapped. It is real capacity, it is in your datastore used figure, and it does not exist on the other side of the exit. Here is the arithmetic for pulling it back out before you size the destination.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 24th, 2026 | 16 min read
Raw Device Mapping and the Multi-Writer Flag: What Happens to Shared Disks After the vSphere Exit
Two guests writing to one disk on purpose is a configuration that has run quietly in vSphere estates for fifteen years, and it is one of the reliable ways for a migration plan to come apart. Here is what the multi-writer flag, raw device mapping and SCSI-3 persistent reservations were actually doing, where each one lands on the destination platform, and which part of the guarantee has no clean replacement.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 21st, 2026 | 15 min read
Crash-Consistent by Default: Who Quiesces the Guest After the vSphere Exit
On vSphere, asking for a quiesced snapshot was a checkbox, and VMware Tools quietly drove the guest filesystem and the Windows VSS writers on your behalf. After the exit that layer is gone, a CSI VolumeSnapshot is crash-consistent unless somebody makes it otherwise, and the failure is silent rather than loud. Here is what each piece of the old chain was doing, where it lands now, and which link has no automatic replacement.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 18th, 2026 | 11 min read
VMware Capacity Planning After the Exit: Why the Old Forecast Overbuys
A vSAN cluster sized for 400 TB of usable capacity holds roughly 800 TB of raw flash, and the plan behind it reserved a quarter of that again before anyone was allowed to fill it. Carry that number into an exit plan and you will buy a machine that is substantially too big. The capacity forecast is a model with four inputs, three of them change when the datastore goes away, and nobody hands the buyer the new arithmetic. Here is the model, the ratios, and what rebuilding the forecast actually costs.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 15th, 2026 | 16 min read
The Array Integration You Lose: vVols, VASA and VAAI After the vSphere Exit
Keeping the array through a hypervisor migration is a defensible decision, and most of the arguments for it are about capacity and depreciation. Almost none of them mention that three of the array's most useful features were never really the array's. vVols needs a VASA provider registered in vCenter. VAAI's offload primitives are SCSI commands the ESXi storage stack issues. Take the hypervisor out and the array keeps presenting blocks, while the integration contract quietly ends.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 10th, 2026 | 16 min read
Space Reclamation After the vSphere Exit: Who Gives Deleted Blocks Back
About three months after the cutover, someone notices the pool reports 41 TB consumed while the volumes only claim 12. Nothing has failed. Deleted space is simply not coming back, because the chain that used to return it was a column, an alarm, and a per-datastore setting in vSphere, and it has different owners now. Here is each link in that chain, who owns it after the exit, and how to prove it works.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 7th, 2026 | 14 min read
vSAN Stretched Cluster Replacement: Two-Site Synchronous Storage After the VMware Exit
A vSAN stretched cluster is not one feature. It is two data sites, a witness that holds no data, site-local read affinity, and a policy object that expresses failures to tolerate across sites and within them. Leaving vSAN removes all four at the same time, and the migration plans that go wrong are the ones that only replaced the mirror. Here is what each piece actually did and what has to take it over.
Chris Engelbert
Sep 3rd, 2026 | 12 min read
K3s vs K8s vs RKE2 vs Talos: Compared by What Each Assumes About Storage
Every Kubernetes distribution comparison scores the same things: install time, footprint, upgrade model, air-gap story. None of them score the one default that decides whether the cluster can run production VMs, and it is set before you deploy a single workload. Here is what k3s, upstream Kubernetes, RKE2, and Talos each assume about storage out of the box, and what that assumption costs on Day 2.
Chris Engelbert
Aug 31st, 2026 | 16 min read
Migrating VMware to Red Hat OpenShift: The Storage Decisions MTV Makes For You
The Migration Toolkit for Virtualization asks you for one thing on the storage side: a StorageClass. It then makes four decisions on your behalf, and three of them are hard to reverse once the virtual machine is running. Here is what MTV actually does to your disks, which defaults hurt, and what the destination storage layer does and does not change.
Chris Engelbert
Aug 28th, 2026 | 13 min read
Leaving VMware Without a Hypervisor: Bare-Metal Kubernetes and the Storage Problem
Every VMware exit plan assumes the exit lands on another hypervisor. A third path exists: no hypervisor at all, containers straight on physical servers. It is a real option, and it removes something most teams do not notice they were relying on. Not the hypervisor, the datastore. Here is what bare-metal Kubernetes does to storage, why it strands capacity by default, and how the three exit paths actually compare.
Chris Engelbert
Aug 25th, 2026 | 19 min read
What Happens to Your VMware VDI Desktops When You Leave vSphere
Every VMware exit plan covers the server estate. Almost none of them cover the desktops. VDI is the most storage-latency-sensitive workload in the vSphere estate, which means the boot storm, the clone provisioning model and the per-desktop write churn all land on whatever StorageClass you happen to pick. Here is the requirement-by-requirement translation, including the parts storage does not solve at all.
Chris Engelbert
Aug 21st, 2026 | 12 min read
VMware Cloud Foundation 9: What the Forced Upgrade Changes About Your Storage Design
Most VMware exit writing argues about cost. The vSphere 8 support deadline argues about the calendar instead, and the in-family destination quietly changes the storage design underneath you. Here is what a platform release actually touches below the datastore, what the published support dates really buy you, and what each available path does to your storage architecture.
Chris Engelbert
Aug 17th, 2026 | 12 min read
Kubernetes Node Disk Pressure: Why Pods Keep Getting Evicted
Pruning images and rotating logs clears a DiskPressure alert. It does not stop it coming back. The reason is what kubelet measures, and where your workload's state happens to live.
Chris Engelbert
Aug 13th, 2026 | 12 min read
Pod Has Unbound Immediate PersistentVolumeClaims: Causes and Fixes
The scheduler refuses to place your pod because a PVC never got bound. Here are the five causes worth checking, in the order that finds the problem fastest, and the storage design that stops it recurring.
Chris Engelbert
Jul 14th, 2026 | 10 min read
Why OpenEBS Becomes a Liability When You Use It to Replace vSAN
VMware teams replacing vSAN with OpenEBS often discover the operational bill arrives later than the licensing one. Storage pool CRDs, replica rebuild windows, and an engine transition most teams never planned for are what OpenEBS operational burden looks like in production. Here is what to expect and what managed NVMe/TCP offers as an alternative path.
Chris Engelbert
Jul 13th, 2026 | 8 min read
CSI Snapshot Architecture: VolumeSnapshotClass Design and Controller Internals
Most clusters run one default VolumeSnapshotClass for every workload. That works until a restore fails at the exact moment it matters. Here is how the CSI snapshot chain actually works, how to design per-workload snapshot policy, and why the backend's snapshot mechanism decides whether restores stay fast as the cluster grows.
Chris Engelbert
Jul 9th, 2026 | 8 min read
Why Ceph Becomes a Liability When You Use It to Replace vSAN
VMware teams replacing vSAN with Ceph often discover unexpected operational costs. Monitor quorum management, OSD lifecycle sequencing, and BlueStore tuning are skills vSphere admins do not carry over. Here is what Ceph operational burden looks like in the first year and what managed NVMe/TCP offers as an alternative path.
Chris Engelbert
Jun 17th, 2026 | 7 min read
KV Cache Offloading: The New Storage Workload for AI Inference
Large language model inference keeps a key-value cache in scarce GPU memory, and as context windows and concurrency grow that cache no longer fits. KV cache offloading moves the overflow to fast NVMe tiers, turning low-latency block storage into a core part of the AI inference stack.
Chris Engelbert
Jun 16th, 2026 | 7 min read
FIPS Compliant Storage: A Practical Guide for Regulated Teams in 2026
What FIPS compliant storage really means, the difference between FIPS-compliant and FIPS-validated, and how to get encryption at rest that passes a federal security review without giving up performance.
Chris Engelbert
Jun 15th, 2026 | 8 min read
Top 5 European Cloud Infrastructure Providers in 2026
The leading European cloud infrastructure providers in 2026, from OVHcloud and Hetzner to Scaleway, IONOS, and Exoscale, plus the sovereign storage layer that completes the stack.
Chris Engelbert
Jun 13th, 2026 | 8 min read
Top 5 European AI Cloud Providers in 2026
The leading European AI cloud and GPU providers in 2026, from Scaleway and OVHcloud to Nebius, Nscale, and Verda, plus the sovereign storage layer that keeps GPUs fed.
Chris Engelbert
Jun 8th, 2026 | 9 min read
NVMe-oF for Kubernetes Storage: A Platform Engineer's Guide
NVMe over Fabrics changes how Kubernetes storage works at the protocol layer. This guide explains what NVMe-oF is, how NVMe/TCP and NVMe/RoCE differ, how the Kubernetes CSI layer sits on top, and what platform engineers need to validate before deploying NVMe-oF-based storage in production.
Chris Engelbert
May 12th, 2026 | 9 min read
Zero-Downtime Storage Upgrades: What 'Live Upgrade' Actually Requires
Storage vendors frequently claim live upgrade support. What the claim often obscures is the difference between an upgrade procedure that minimizes downtime and one tested to produce zero I/O errors throughout, verified by running a concurrent workload during the entire process.
Chris Engelbert
Apr 6th, 2026 | 4 min read
NVMe-oF Storage for OpenShift
Learn where NVMe-oF fits in OpenShift storage architecture, how NVMe/TCP and NVMe/RoCE differ, and what platform teams should validate before rollout.
Chris Engelbert
Apr 6th, 2026 | 4 min read
Storage High Availability for OpenShift
Design storage high availability for OpenShift by aligning replication, topology, failover testing, and application recovery expectations.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 31st, 2026 | 6 min read
Best vSAN Alternatives 2026
The best vSAN alternatives in 2026 depend on your migration path, performance requirements, and operating model. Compare simplyblock, Ceph, and Longhorn.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 30th, 2026 | 6 min read
How to Build a Low-Latency Data Platform with OpenShift
Build a low-latency OpenShift data platform by designing for p99 behavior across node pools, storage classes, network paths, and day-2 operations.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 27th, 2026 | 6 min read
How to Guarantee Quality of Service with OpenShift Storage
Learn how to guarantee OpenShift storage QoS using CSI policy tiers, tenant isolation, and measurable SLO guardrails with simplyblock for predictable p99 latency.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 25th, 2026 | 7 min read
SPDK Storage on Kubernetes: Performance vs CPU Efficiency
SPDK-style storage architectures can unlock major performance gains in Kubernetes, but platform teams must evaluate CPU tradeoffs and workload fit carefully.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 25th, 2026 | 15 min read
Simplyblock Replaces Your VMware and Database Architecture
The VMware + database stack was never designed for modern workloads. Here's how simplyblock and PostgreSQL replace it with a decoupled, API-driven, Kubernetes-native data architecture.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 21st, 2026 | 9 min read
Talos Linux Storage for Kubernetes
Running stateful workloads on Talos Linux requires clear storage design choices, especially around NVMe-first performance, operations simplicity, and day-2 reliability.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 19th, 2026 | 9 min read
What It Really Takes to Replace Ceph in Enterprise Environments
Replacing Ceph in enterprise environments is less about feature parity and more about day-2 operations, performance predictability, and migration risk control.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 17th, 2026 | 11 min read
Disaster Recovery Volumes for Kubernetes
Disaster recovery volumes give Kubernetes teams a predictable standby strategy across clusters, with clear RPO and RTO tradeoffs for enterprise stateful workloads.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 13th, 2026 | 9 min read
Kubernetes Group Snapshots for Multi-Volume Apps
Kubernetes group snapshots help platform teams recover complex multi-volume apps consistently, especially databases and enterprise services that span data, logs, and metadata volumes.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 11th, 2026 | 6 min read
Best Storage for AI Agents 2026
The best storage for AI agents in 2026 depends on memory patterns, latency consistency, and operational model. Compare Simplyblock, object storage with cache layers, and managed vector databases.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 11th, 2026 | 8 min read
Point-in-Time Recovery for PostgreSQL on Kubernetes: What Actually Matters
PITR on Kubernetes is not just a snapshot feature. You need a base backup, reliable WAL archiving, and a restore path that works under pressure.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 10th, 2026 | 7 min read
Achieving Data Sovereignty in 2026
Data sovereignty in 2026 requires more than region selection. This guide explains how to design, operate, and scale sovereignty-by-design infrastructure with simplyblock.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 4th, 2026 | 7 min read
Best SUSE Rancher HCI Storage Solutions 2026
The best SUSE Rancher HCI storage solutions in 2026 depend on workload criticality, platform maturity, and operating model. Compare simplyblock, Longhorn, and Harvester.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 3rd, 2026 | 6 min read
Best Talos Storage 2026
Choosing Talos storage in 2026 means balancing performance, reliability, and operational complexity. Compare simplyblock, OpenEBS, and Ceph with practical tradeoffs.
Chris Engelbert
Mar 2nd, 2026 | 6 min read
Best Kubernetes HCI Storage Solutions 2026
The best Kubernetes HCI storage solutions in 2026 depend on workload intensity, operations model, and scaling strategy. Compare simplyblock, Nutanix, and Harvester.
Chris Engelbert
Feb 19th, 2026 | 5 min read
Building an Agentic-Ready Kubernetes Platform in 2026
Building an agentic-ready Kubernetes platform in 2026 requires infrastructure patterns for stateful memory, predictable storage latency, policy-driven operations, and failure-aware scaling.
Chris Engelbert
Feb 16th, 2026 | 5 min read
How to scale Kubernetes Storage beyond a single machine 2026
Scaling Kubernetes storage beyond a single machine in 2026 requires a shift from node-local persistence to distributed, failure-aware storage architecture with predictable performance and operations.
Chris Engelbert
Feb 6th, 2026 | 7 min read
Best Openshift Storage 2026
Choosing OpenShift storage in 2026 means balancing performance, operational complexity, and cost. Here are three practical options: simplyblock, OpenEBS, and Ceph.
Chris Engelbert
Jan 28th, 2026 | 7 min read
Best storage for On-Prem Openshift
Comparing on-prem OpenShift storage options in 2026: Simplyblock, OpenShift Data Foundation, and Longhorn across performance, operations, and cost control.
Chris Engelbert
Jan 17th, 2026 | 6 min read
Best Multi-tenant storage 2026
Compare the best multi-tenant storage options in 2026 for Kubernetes and OpenShift: Simplyblock, Longhorn, and Ceph, with practical guidance on performance and operations.
Chris Engelbert
Aug 26th, 2025 | 5 min read
Top 5 Competitors to OpenEBS
Understand how simplyblock compares to OpenEBS and its competitors, delivering scalable, high-performance Kubernetes storage.
Chris Engelbert
Aug 7th, 2025 | 7 min read
Storage Tail Latency Matters: The Silent Killer
When we talk about storage performance, we typically think of IOPS and throughput. In the best case, we also talk about average or best-case access latency. However, tail latency, the high-percentile…
Chris Engelbert
Jul 24th, 2025 | 18 min read
Benchmarking Simplyblock Storage on ClickBench with PostgreSQL and DuckDB
As storage demands scale and workloads become increasingly performance-sensitive, the right infrastructure choices can drive massive gains in both throughput and efficiency. At simplyblock, we set…
Chris Engelbert
May 22nd, 2025 | 12 min read
Benchmark Network-Attached Storage - It’s Harder Than You Think
TLDR: Many factors influence benchmarks for network-attached storage. Latency and throughput limitations, as well as protocol overhead, network congestion, and caching effects, may create much better…
Chris Engelbert
May 15th, 2025 | 4 min read
Simplyblock + Xata: Powering the Future of Postgres with Next-Gen Storage
We’re excited to congratulate our friends over at Xata on a significant milestone for developer infrastructure: Xata’s new PostgreSQL support is now backed by simplyblock’s NVMe/TCP software-defined…
Chris Engelbert
May 12th, 2025 | 4 min read
Top 5 Competitors to CubeFS
Simplyblock competes with CubeFS by offering higher IOPS, NVMe-oF support, and simplified Kubernetes-native storage for modern workloads.
Chris Engelbert
May 12th, 2025 | 5 min read
Top 5 Competitors to LINBIT
LINBIT competitors like simplyblock deliver better scalability, lower latency, and application-transparent tiering for enterprise storage.
Chris Engelbert
May 12th, 2025 | 4 min read
Top 5 Competitors to ZFS
OpenZFS is reliable, but simplyblock offers faster performance, better scaling, and advanced features for Kubernetes and enterprise storage.
Chris Engelbert
May 12th, 2025 | 5 min read
Top 5 Competitors to StorPool
Looking beyond StorPool? simplyblock delivers more flexibility, better performance, and full Kubernetes-native integration.
Chris Engelbert
May 12th, 2025 | 3 min read
Simplyblock Competitors - NVMe SDS Block Storage 2026
Block storage competitors like simplyblock deliver more flexibility, better scale-out NVMe performance, and lower operational complexity.
Chris Engelbert
May 9th, 2025 | 7 min read
Ceph Alternatives: 5 Options Compared
An honest comparison of Ceph alternatives for Kubernetes and private cloud: simplyblock, Longhorn, LINBIT (DRBD), OpenEBS, and ZFS, including where Ceph remains the right choice.
Chris Engelbert
May 9th, 2025 | 4 min read
Longhorn Alternatives: 5 Options Compared
An honest look at Longhorn alternatives for Kubernetes block storage: where Longhorn's simplicity wins, where its performance ceiling binds, and which alternative fits which estate.
Chris Engelbert
May 9th, 2025 | 5 min read
Top 5 Competitors to Rook
See how simplyblock outperforms Rook and other top Kubernetes storage platforms on speed, scale, and flexibility.
Chris Engelbert
May 9th, 2025 | 11 min read
Ceph on NVMe Made No Sense to Us—So We Built a 40x Better Alternative
TLDR: Simplyblock delivers 4x performance with 25% of the resources compared to Ceph. When it comes to software-defined storage (SDS), performance is more than just a technical metric—it’s the…
Chris Engelbert
May 7th, 2025 | 4 min read
5 Top Competitors to Blockbridge
Blockbridge is a software-defined storage (SDS) solution that offers high-performance, all-flash NVMe block storage for enterprise applications and cloud providers. It provides features like…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 13th, 2025 | 4 min read
New Apache Cassandra Release Saves 400% IOPS
On April 10, 2025, the Apache Software Foundation released version 5.0.4 of Apache Cassandra, bringing significant performance optimizations for all users—but especially for those relying on remotely…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 10th, 2025 | 13 min read
Kubernetes Storage Without the Pain - Simplyblock in 15 Minutes
Whether you're building a high-performance cloud-native app or running data-heavy workloads in your own infrastructure, persistent storage is necessary. In Kubernetes, this means having storage that…
Chris Engelbert
Feb 19th, 2025 | 16 min read
Choosing the Right Kubernetes Storage Solution for Your Workloads
TLDR: Choosing the right Kubernetes Storage isn’t easy. As a guideline for the selection, make sure you have the best of hyper-converged (co-located) and disaggregated setups. Also, make sure that…
Chris Engelbert
Jan 27th, 2025 | 12 min read
Top Kubernetes Storage Solutions in 2026
Selecting your Kubernetes persistent storage may be tough due to the many available options. Not all are geared towards enterprise setups, though. Hence, we would like to briefly introduce five…
Chris Engelbert
Jan 24th, 2025 | 12 min read
The 15 Top Infrastructure Management Tools
Managing cloud and on-prem infrastructures is crucial for business operations. Hence, infrastructure management tools have become the norm to help operate on-premise and cloud environments. These…
Chris Engelbert
Jan 17th, 2025 | 4 min read
We Built a Tool to Help You Understand Your Real EBS Usage!
There is one question in life that is really hard to answer: “What is your actual AWS EBS volume usage?” When talking to customers and users, this question is frequently left open with the note that…
Chris Engelbert
Jan 8th, 2025 | 15 min read
NVMe over TCP vs iSCSI - Evolution of Network Storage
TLDR: In a direct comparison of NVMe over TCP vs iSCSI, we see that NVMe over TCP outranks iSCSI in all categories with IOPS improvements of up to 50% (and more) and latency improvements by up to…
Chris Engelbert
Dec 17th, 2024 | 16 min read
Encryption At Rest: A Comprehensive Guide to DARE
TLDR: Data At Rest Encryption (DARE) is the process of encrypting data when stored on a storage medium. The encryption transforms the readable data (plaintext) into an encoded format (ciphertext)…
Chris Engelbert
Dec 11th, 2024 | 13 min read
Scale Up vs Scale Out: System Scalability Strategies
TLDR: Horizontal scalability (scale out) describes a system that scales by adding more resources through parallel systems, whereas vertical scalability (scale up) increases the amount of resources on…
Chris Engelbert
Dec 10th, 2024 | 7 min read
AWS Cost Management: Strategies for Right-Sizing Storage in Dynamic Environments
( Pixabay ) For companies that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for storage, having firm control over costs is key. Mismanaging storage can directly lead to soaring expenses and unexpected losses in a…
Chris Engelbert
Nov 27th, 2024 | 8 min read
NVMe & Kubernetes: Future-Proof Infrastructure
The marriage of NVMe storage and Kubernetes persistent volumes represents a perfect union of high-performance storage and modern container orchestration. As organizations increasingly move…
Chris Engelbert
Oct 23rd, 2024 | 13 min read
Serverless Compute Need Serverless Storage
The use of serverless infrastructures is steeply increasing. As the Datadog “State of Serverless 2023” survey shows, more than half of all cloud customers have already adopted a serverless…
Chris Engelbert
Oct 10th, 2024 | 12 min read
AWS Storage Optimization - Avoid EBS Over-provisioning
"Cloud is expensive” is an often repeated phrase among IT professionals. What makes the cloud so expensive, though? One element that significantly drives cloud costs is storage over-provisioning and…
Chris Engelbert
Aug 21st, 2024 | 7 min read
Kubernetes 1.31: Day of the Storage
On August 13, the Kubernetes team released Kubernetes 1.31, a release also known as "Elli". The release follows about a month after the release of 1.30 (Uwubernetes) which also marked the 10 year…
Chris Engelbert
Jul 25th, 2024 | 9 min read
Say Goodbye to High Data Access-Latency Cloud Storage with Simplyblock’s Local NVMe SSD Caching
When using persistent storage on cloud providers, there are two options: locally attached (like AWS’ Instance Store or GCP Local SSD) or remote (like Amazon EBS or Google Persistent Disks). Both have…
Chris Engelbert
Jul 19th, 2024 | 17 min read
Image Recognition with Neural Networks: A Beginner's Guide
If you’re anything like me, you must be anxious to understand how computers can recognize image. Certainly, it can’t be magic—we know that for a fact—but how does it work? As a disclaimer, I’m not a…
Chris Engelbert
Jul 15th, 2024 | 8 min read
Neo4j in Cloud and Kubernetes: Advantages, Cypher Queries, and Use Cases
In the era of big data, managing complex relationships is crucial. Neo4j , a leading graph database, excels at handling intricate data connections, making it indispensable for modern applications.…
Chris Engelbert
Jun 27th, 2024 | 25 min read
Machine Learning driven Database Optimization with Luigi Nardi from DBtune (interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , and our show site . In this insightful video, we explore the cutting-edge…
Chris Engelbert
Jun 20th, 2024 | 22 min read
How I designed PostgreSQL High Availability with Shaun Thomas from Tembo (video + interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube, Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment, we're…
Chris Engelbert
Jun 14th, 2024 | 18 min read
Easy Developer Namespaces with Multi-tenant Kubernetes with Alessandro Vozza from Kubespaces
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment of…
Chris Engelbert
Jun 12th, 2024 | 11 min read
Kubernetes Persistent Volumes - Best Practices & Guide
Storage management in Kubernetes can be complex, especially for teams running stateful workloads like databases. While K8s excels at container orchestration, its default ephemeral storage isn't…
Chris Engelbert
Jun 7th, 2024 | 23 min read
Policy Management at Cloud-Scale with Anders Eknert from Styra (video + interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment of…
Chris Engelbert
Jun 6th, 2024 | 10 min read
How to choose your Kubernetes Postgres Operator?
A Postgres Operator for Kubernetes eases the management of PostgreSQL clusters inside the Kubernetes (k8s) environment. It watches changes (additions, updates, deletes) of PostgreSQL related CRD…
Chris Engelbert
May 31st, 2024 | 19 min read
Your CI/CD Pipeline is a Production system with Stefan Prodan from ControlPlane (video + interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment of…
Chris Engelbert
May 29th, 2024 | 7 min read
What is Software-Defined Storage (SDS)?
Software-defined (block) storage solutions, or SDS, decouple the software storage layer from the underlying hardware. This allows for centralized management and automation of storage resources…
Chris Engelbert
May 24th, 2024 | 23 min read
Continuous vulnerability scanning in production with Oshrat Nir from ARMO
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment of…
Chris Engelbert
May 17th, 2024 | 20 min read
How Oracle transforms its operation into a cloud business with Gerald Venzl from Oracle
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment of…
Chris Engelbert
May 15th, 2024 | 8 min read
What is Block Storage?
The term Block storage describes a technology that controls how data is stored on storage devices. The name is derived from the fact that block storage splits any kind of information, such as files…
Chris Engelbert
May 10th, 2024 | 20 min read
Automated Vulnerability Detection throughout your Pipeline with Brian Vermeer from Snyk
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment of…
Chris Engelbert
May 8th, 2024 | 9 min read
What is NVMe Storage?
NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Express, is a modern access and storage protocol for flash-based solid-state storage. Designed for low overhead, latency, and response times, it aims for the highest…
Chris Engelbert
May 2nd, 2024 | 15 min read
PostgreSQL mistakes and how to avoid them with Jimmy Angelakos
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment of…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 26th, 2024 | 21 min read
Coding the Cloud: A Dive into Data Streaming with Gunnar Morling from Decodable (video + interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock's Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment of…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 24th, 2024 | 15 min read
IOPS vs Throughput vs Latency - Storage Performance Metrics
IOPS, throughput, and latency are interrelated metrics that provide insight into the read, write, and access performance of storage entities and network interconnects. IOPS means input/output…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 19th, 2024 | 18 min read
Improve Security with API Gateways, Nicolas Fränkel
In this installment of the podcast, we talked to Nicolas Fränkel (X/Twitter) from API7.ai, the creator of Apache APISIX, a high-performance open-source API gateway, discusses the significance of…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 12th, 2024 | 17 min read
Building a Time Series Database in the Cloud with Steven Sklar from QuestDB (video + interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment of the…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 10th, 2024 | 9 min read
Kubernetes - Future or Fad?
Kubernetes has pretty much become synonymous with container orchestration, and all competition is either assimilated (or rewritten to be based on Kubernetes, see Openshift), or basically disappeared…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 5th, 2024 | 25 min read
Production-grade Kubernetes PostgreSQL, Álvaro Hernández
In this episode of the Cloud Commute podcast, Chris Engelbert is joined by Álvaro Hernández Tortosa, a prominent figure in the PostgreSQL community and CEO of OnGres. Álvaro shares his deep insights…
Chris Engelbert
Apr 3rd, 2024 | 8 min read
What is a Kubernetes Persistent Volume?
A persistent volume is a slice of storage provisioned by a Kubernetes administrator that can be attached and mounted to pods. Like everything in Kubernetes, it is a resource inside the cluster, and…
Chris Engelbert
Mar 28th, 2024 | 3 min read
AWS Cost Optimization with Cristian Magherusan-Stanciu from AutoSpotting (interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube, Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment, we're…
Chris Engelbert
Mar 27th, 2024 | 8 min read
Kubernetes CSI: Container Attached Storage
Containerized services must be stateless, a doctrine that was widely used in the early days of containerization, which came hand-in-hand with microservices. While it makes elasticity easy, these…
Chris Engelbert
Mar 22nd, 2024 | 25 min read
Kubernetes for AI, GKE, and serverless with Abdellfetah Sghiouar from Google (interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube, Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment, we're talking…
Chris Engelbert
Mar 20th, 2024 | 5 min read
What is Kubernetes - The Components and The Beast
During the last decade containerized services have emerged as the game-changer in terms of deployment simplicity, scalability, and componentization or modularization. Kubernetes is at the forefront…
Chris Engelbert
Mar 15th, 2024 | 19 min read
Confidential Computing with Moritz Eckert from Edgeless Systems (interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment , we're…
Chris Engelbert
Mar 11th, 2024 | 15 min read
Distributed SQL Databases with Franck Pachot from Yugabyte (interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment , we're…
Chris Engelbert
Mar 8th, 2024 | 22 min read
Data center and application sustainability with Rich Kenny from Interact (interview)
This interview is part of the simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube , Spotify , iTunes/Apple Podcasts , Pandora , Samsung Podcasts, and our show site . In this installment , we're…
Chris Engelbert
Mar 6th, 2024 | 9 min read
What is Erasure Coding - A Shield Against Data Loss
Erasure Coding (erasure code) is a data protection mechanism that protects against data loss by breaking data items, such as files, into fragments, calculating additional data pieces (parity…
Chris Engelbert
Feb 28th, 2024 | 9 min read
AWS EBS Pricing: A Comprehensive Guide
In the vast landscape of cloud computing, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) stands out as a crucial component for storage in AWS’ Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), as well as other AWS…