Containerization is bringing greater agility to computing environments. By enabling companies to move applications and data freely between platforms, containerization is helping them to dissolve siloes in their IT infrastructures and move towards hybrid cloud architecture, empowering them to seize competitive advantage.
Harnessing the latest tools
As containerization technology enters the mainstream, new opportunities and challenges are emerging. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a popular enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform that many organizations have chosen to manage their hybrid and multicloud deployments. There is a wealth of documentation around the platform out there – enough to make finding answers to specific questions difficult!
At IBM Garage, we strive to fill in the gaps in our customers’ knowledge. We recently encountered a query that isn’t adequately covered by existing documentation. The scenario: how to share Cloud infrastructures between projects, departments or clients, and how to introduce multitenancy and its usage for workloads calling for persistent storage.
Why is this use case relevant? Anyone who wants to implement multitenancy for storage resources – such as Managed Service Providers (MSPs) – won’t want to expose their entire storage landscape to customers, since this could allow a single instance to monopolize their storage platform. With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform alone it isn’t possible to prevent this. But by adding IBM Spectrum Virtualize and the IBM block storage CSI driver, users can control resource consumption and define Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Building a step-by-step handbook
To guide you through this process, we created a document describing the different concepts necessary to implement multitenancy on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform using IBM Spectrum Virtualize. The stages described could be applied to multiple scenarios; including the capacity for an MSP to allow a customer to use, or not, a storage class; to allocate the storage according to the customer profile; and so on.
Using the proposed approach, you can set and enforce rules for storage resource consumption in multitenant environments. You can use existing storage infrastructure in your containerized architecture, allowing you to embrace this exciting new technology while controlling costs. By following our guide, you can learn transferable skills that can help you get the most out of Kubernetes platforms.
To get our step-by-step guide to implementing multitenancy on OPC with IBM Storage, contact Gauthier Siri.
Gauthier Siri
Storage IT Specialist, IBM Garage Montpellier
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