ANZ Pied Piper

In today's article I wanted to share some work I have been doing recently, specifically a prototype for an on-prem Storage-as-a-Service with DellEMC PowerStore A few years ago we used to hear a lot the "we have a cloud-first policy" and this of course meant "public cloud". The promise of lower cost pay-per use, self-service and automated IT consumption attracted many customers. Many of these organizations discovered the hard way that the financial aspect of it was not exactly "low cost". Public cloud makes solid sense for a bursty application but your average workload can typically run on-prem for up to 50% less However the self-service and automated IT consumption capabilities changed everyone's perspective of how IT resources should be consumed. Organizations nowadays expect that capability on-prem as well. If they succeed in getting it they will have the best of both worlds: empower the end users, operational efficiency and financial savings The

PowerFlex (formerly ScaleIO and VxFlex) has long be one of the best choices for Kubernetes persistent storage. For a long time, ScaleIO was one of the handful of storage drivers available in-tree, even when CSI was not around. The thing is that PowerFlex is a scale-out software defined solution, much like Kubernetes itself. This makes it a great match. But also, in a world where we keep deploying scaled out high performance containerised applications such as ElasticSearch, MongoDB or Cassandra there is an ever increasing requirement for high IO low latency persistent layer. PowerFlex is a great choice for these workloads  With that in mind a colleague of mind has put together a series of videos showing how one can leverage modern DevOps tools like Ansible and Terraform to deploy such solutions easily and efficiently. Terraform is used here as a provisioning tool and Ansible for Configuration Management In the first video Jonathan uses Terraform to deploy a number of Virtual Machines on