Simplyblock for Platform Architects
Why Platform Architects Should Care About Simplyblock
As a platform architect, you’re constantly seeking ways to optimize your cloud infrastructure, reduce costs, and enhance performance. Simplyblock offers a compelling solution that addresses these key concerns. By intelligently orchestrating and unifying access to various storage technologies like Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and local instance storage (directly attached NVMe disks), simplyblock enables you to consolidate partially utilized storage volumes into a shared, efficient storage pool. This not only saves costs but also simplifies management, allowing you to focus on higher-level architectural decisions rather than wrestling with storage complexities.
Key Benefits for Platform Architects
Optimizing your cloud infrastructure is a challenge. That’s why simplyblock provides a compelling set of benefits to Platform Architects.
Simplified Storage Management
One of the most significant advantages simplyblock offers is the ability to abstract away the complexities of storage management. With its thin provisioning technology, you can create virtual, logical volumes of any size without pre-allocating storage from the underlying pool. Additionally, you can overcommit the storage pool. It will automatically be resized before running out of available physical disk space. This means you no longer need to meticulously plan and provision storage resources upfront, freeing you to focus on more strategic aspects of your platform architecture.
Enhanced Performance
Simplyblock leverages NVMe over TCP, providing high-performance storage access that’s compatible with both Linux and Windows kernels out of the box. This eliminates the need for additional drivers and simplifies deployment across your infrastructure. For workloads requiring ultra-low latency, simplyblock can utilize local instance storage as either a primary tier or a cache for slower storage tiers like Amazon S3, giving you the flexibility to optimize performance where it matters most.
Improved Security and Isolation
With per-volume encryption and full isolation between multiple tenants on a shared storage pool, simplyblock enhances your platform’s security posture. This is particularly valuable if you’re architecting multi-tenant systems or need to ensure strict data separation between different parts of your infrastructure, different departments or teams.
Disaster Recovery and Data Protection
Simplyblock’s support for disaster recovery across availability zones using Amazon S3 and its write-ahead log streaming provides robust data protection. The ability to take consistent snapshots across multiple logical volumes is a game-changer for architectures that span multiple databases, database types, or storage services, ensuring you can maintain a coherent state across your entire system in the event of a disaster.
Cloud Cost Optimization
One of the most pressing concerns for platform architects is managing cloud costs. Simplyblock offers several features that directly address this.
Thin Provisioning
The thin provisioning capability allows you to overcommit storage resources, allocating only what’s actually being used. This can lead to significant cost savings, especially in environments with varying or unpredictable storage needs.
Efficient Use of Amazon EBS Volumes
Simplyblock’s ability to pool and manage Amazon EBS volumes efficiently means you can make better use of your existing storage resources, potentially reducing the number of volumes you need to provision and manage. Simplyblock automatically allocates additional Amazon EBS volumes into the pool when required.
Storage Tiering
By automatically moving infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage options like Amazon S3, simplyblock helps you optimize storage costs without manual intervention. This is particularly valuable for large-scale data storage where a significant portion of data may be cold or infrequently accessed.
Compression and Deduplication
With built-in support for transparent compression of logical volumes, simplyblock can help reduce your overall storage footprint, leading to direct cost savings on storage resources.
Practical Use Cases for Platform Architects
Database Management and Optimization
For organizations running multiple databases or offering (private and public) database-as-a-service solutions, simplyblock’s ability to provide consistent snapshots across multiple volumes is invaluable. This feature simplifies backup and recovery processes, ensuring data consistency across your entire database ecosystem.
Development and Testing Environments
The copy-on-write nature of simplyblock’s storage solution, as well as the support for immediate snapshots and drive clones make simplyblock an excellent choice for managing development and testing environments. You can quickly spin up clones of production databases for testing, significantly reducing the time and resources required for environment provisioning.
Multi-tenant Architectures
If you’re designing multi-tenant systems, simplyblock’s support for full isolation between tenants on a shared storage pool can simplify your architecture while maintaining strong security boundaries. This is particularly useful for SaaS platforms or internal systems serving multiple business units.
High-Performance Computing Workloads
For architectures that include high-performance computing elements, simplyblock’s ability to leverage local instance storage for ultra-low latency access, combined with its intelligent tiering capabilities, can provide the performance needed for demanding workloads while still optimizing costs. The best, all the of it is completely transparent to the service or application, well “hidden” behind the logical volume interface.
Implementing Simplyblock in Your Organization
Integrating simplyblock into your existing architecture is straightforward, thanks to its use of standard protocols and interfaces. Here are some key considerations:
- Assess your current storage usage and identify areas where consolidation and optimization could yield benefits.
- Contact simplyblock for a pilot project, perhaps in a development or testing environment.
- If you use Kubernetes, leverage simplyblock’s Kubernetes integration through its CSI driver to seamlessly incorporate it into your container orchestration strategy.
- Use simplyblock’s StorageClass definitions in Kubernetes to fine-tune performance characteristics for different workloads.
- Plan for a phased rollout, starting with non-critical workloads and gradually expanding to more crucial systems as you gain confidence and experience with the platform.