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In its 2021 annual survey report, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation declared that Kubernetes had “crossed the chasm” to become a mainstream global technology. Indeed, citing nearly any metric you might choose, Kubernetes has moved beyond adoption by visionaries to adoption by the pragmatic. For example, the CNCF report estimated that there were 5.6 million Kubernetes developers worldwide, a 67% increase from the previous year. Undoubtedly, that number is already significantly higher today as we head into the second half of 2022. It’s safe to say that developers everywhere are now building their applications using Kubernetes.
That’s why Ondat has launched a Free Community, PAYG Standard, and Custom Enterprise Editions of our Kubernetes-native data platform. Now developers everywhere can run their stateful applications within Kubernetes and claim all the advantages it brings.
For the most part, developers are stuck with deploying their stateful workloads outside of Kubernetes. This is a big problem, for two reasons. First, developers are unable to exercise the benefits of Kubernetes with respect to their stateful workloads, especially the declarative interface and automation capabilities that can shorten the time to market. Second, developers have to manage storage complexities and separate overhead for their stateful workloads. As an example, their web component might be running in Kubernetes and their database might be stuck outside, perhaps in Amazon’s RDS, for example. In a case such as this, developers could be paying a 2x or 3x premium to run that database as a service. Needless to say, having to run stateful workloads outside of Kubernetes results in higher overhead costs, more management headaches, and an increase in the total cost of ownership for those stateful application workloads.
There’s a Better Way: Elevating Data and Storage to First-Class Citizens in Kubernetes
At Ondat, we believe developers should not have to worry about where they deploy different components of their application. Every part of their applications, whether stateful or stateless—should run in Kubernetes and be afforded all of Kubernetes’ benefits. Data and storage should be “first-class citizens” in Kubernetes: automation, scaling, self-healing, security policies, GitOps capabilities, and everything else that Kubernetes offers should apply to the stateful portions of an application as well as the stateless. Whether using databases, message queues, Elasticsearch, or Kafka components, developers should never have to be concerned about managing a separate storage layer for their Kubernetes applications.
Our Vision: Democratizing Kubernetes Storage
Our vision at Ondat is bold: we aim to democratize cloud-native data services by lowering cost and implementation barriers to the Ondat solution. Our free Community Edition reflects this vision by offering:
- Self-service installation. Exceptionally easy to deploy and manage, the Community Edition is available here for free licensing and self-service installation.
- Unlimited nodes, 1 TiB capacity. Many of the “free” solutions offered in the market today are limited by node, which effectively means you are restricted to using them in a small cluster. In contrast, the Ondat Community Edition offers unlimited nodes. You could have a 10-node, 20-node, or 100-node cluster, and deploy Ondat in full capacity. We’re also not limiting the topology or taxing things like the number of volumes or replicas. The Ondat Community Edition is merely limited by capacity to 1 TiB, which is a sufficient working capacity for quite large databases or message queues.
- Full functionality. The Community Edition comprises the full features of Ondat, including the upgrades in version 2.8 released on June 29, such as support for snapshots, ETCD, and Prometheus. With its ability to span multiple cloud providers, multiple availability zones and multiple instances, the Community Edition of Ondat provides full production capability for DevOps environments. (Note that the Community Edition does not include support for rolling upgrades, which is a largely unnecessary feature at this scale.)
Also NEW: Our Standard Edition SaaS Subscription
For many developers and developer teams, the free Community Edition will provide all the Kubernetes storage capabilities they will ever need. For those with larger workloads, Ondat is introducing a cost-effective way to upgrade to 20 TiBs of capacity with our new Standard Edition SaaS subscription. This extremely price-competitive subscription at $250 per node per year, includes the full features of Ondat plus rolling upgrades and 9-5 support at a fraction of the typical market price—these services would typically require a six- or seven-figure purchase in a traditional data center.
Of course, for organizations whose needs extend beyond 20 TiBs, we continue to offer our Enterprise Edition SaaS subscription with unlimited capacity, rolling upgrades and custom support services.
Visit our Pricing page to compare the features and pricing of Community, Standard and Enterprise Editions of Ondat.
We’re quite serious about our vision of democratizing Kubernetes storage and making Ondat the ubiquitous, de facto industry standard for cloud-native storage, and we hope our actions speak louder than words. For starters, we’re empowering our users with super-simple deployment, launching a generous free Community Edition, and introducing cost-effective pricing for a new Standard Edition that makes Ondat a no-brainer replacement for expensive on-prem solutions. And, as evident in our latest release, we’re also continuously improving Ondat to help our users maximize the performance and flexibility of their stateful workloads.
To cite just two examples: scaling to HA workloads to cloud-based NVMe storage, and providing better and faster disaster recovery options by allowing applications and Kubernetes clusters to operate across availability zones.
Like I said, we have a bold vision; fulfilling that vision will require not only an exceptional product but also innovative approaches to making this solution available to everyone. So stay tuned for more announcements like this one and, if you aren’t already using Ondat, sign up for the Community Edition today.
