AWS re:Invent was the first big tech conference to be held in person since the world shut down near the beginning of 2020. I had the privilege of attending the conference, which proved to be a much needed break from the virtual workspace many of us have been living in for the last year and half. Having been away from conferences for a while, I was pleasantly surprised to see how easily I settled into the familiar conference vibe. At the same time, a lot has transpired in the last couple of years to dramatically shift the IT landscape. Modern application architectures are taking center stage in the minds of customers and vendors alike.
I had a chance to spend some time talking to Pure Storage’s Portworx team, in person nonetheless, about this topic during re:Invent. Following the event, I met with Venkat Ramakrishnan, the Vice President of Engineering and Products for the Cloud Native Business Unit, and had a great discussion of Portworx’s current offerings and how it is looking to the future.
Turbo charged cloud adoption
Heading into 2020, I’m fairly confident that no tech analyst had taken a global pandemic into account when it came to predictions about Enterprise IT. That being said, cloud adoption had already been increasing significantly over the past handful of years. As we now know, lockdowns and the subsequent work from home movement massively accelerated wide scale use of public cloud. Organizations that were thinking about future cloud initiatives were suddenly faced with a need for services that are accessible on demand and at scale.
Public cloud checks all the boxes when it comes to IT agility, and this was on full display at AWS re:Invent. Regardless of how far along we all are on the path, it is evident that a cloud native, development mindset continues to intertwine with Enterprise technology. For all the mentions of things like observability and analytics, there was still a lot of talk about hybrid cloud and even services like AWS Outposts for running workloads on the corporate network in a cloud-like way. The end goal is to allow developers to create without being burdened by Ops. This means IT needs effective tools to deal with modern applications and data that comes along with them.
Bringing modern storage to the Enterprise
When it comes to data, Pure Storage brings a trusted name that is already familiar to many on the Ops side. Portworx by Pure Storage was built from the ground up with a focus on cloud native applications and containers. Now that container management and orchestration is mainstream with Kubernetes, organizations are looking at solutions like AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to run mission critical workloads. Portworx greatly expands the capabilities of the underlying storage services that help run Kubernetes within AWS.
Portworx adds value by integrating with EKS. AWS provides the scalability of cloud infrastructure, while PX-Autopilot intelligently optimizes storage provisioning for EKS. PX-Backup and PX-DR bring Kubernetes native data protection and availability to EKS, allowing cloud native apps to meet strict SLAs and compliance requirements. PX-Secure allows for policy based encryption and role-based access using corporate identity providers.
Now that EKS Anywhere allows customers to run EKS outside of the AWS global infrastructure, a consolidated storage platform becomes even more critical. This is where Portworx seamless integration with all flavors of Pure Storage truly shines. Utilizing Portworx for application storage across the Pure Storage platform, whether on-prem or in the public cloud unlocks the ability to move data and apps seamlessly across any cloud.
Looking towards the future
Portworx Data Services is an exciting new platform that is due to be GA in the first part of 2022. Pure Storage is taking stateful apps beyond just providing a cohesive storage platform across your entire IT infrastructure. Portworx Data Services will provide Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), allowing Portworx to abstract the underlying storage infrastructure from data services. This will empower customers to focus more on their own innovation rather than the infrastructure required to get there.
AWS re:Invent proved to be a great event, not only for getting back to in person events, but for assessing the state of Enterprise IT in the present and near future. Portworx by Pure Storage is well positioned to help drive the future of modern applications. Check out the Portworx solutions at https://portworx.com/.
