Discoblocks

Discoblocks is an open-source declarative disk configuration system for Kubernetes helping to automate CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations for cloud disk device resources attached to Kubernetes cluster nodes.

Why Discoblocks?

Discoblocks can be leveraged by cloud-native data management platforms (like Ondat) to manage backend disks in the cloud.

When using such a data management platform to overcome the block disk device limitation from hyperscalers, a new set of manual operational tasks needs to be considered like:

• provisioning block devices on the Kubernetes worker nodes
• partitioning, formatting, and mounting the block devices within a specific path (like /var/lib/vendor)
• capacity management and monitoring
• resizing and optimizing layouts related to capacity management
• decommissioning the devices in a secure way

At the current stage, Discoblocks is leveraging the available hyperscaler CSI (Container Storage Interface) within the Kubernetes cluster to:

• Introduce a CRD (Custom Resource Definition) per workload with
  • capacity
  • mount path within the Pod
  • nodeSelector
  • podSelector
  • upscale policy
• provision the relevant disk device using the CSI (like EBS on AWS) when the workload deployment will happen
• monitor the volume(s)
• resize automatically the volume based on the upscale policy

Note: An application could be using Discoblocks to get persistent storage but this option would not be safe for production as there will not be any data platform management to address high availability, replication, fencing, and encryption.

*This project is in alpha stage and you are advised not to use it on your production workload*