The rise of container technology has created a new challenge for the storage industry. Within containers, applications, and computation resources are now incredibly mobile, while storage still has to remain persistent and accessible. Here’s how Red Hat is working to address the storage needs of container workloads.

In modern microservice-based architectures, each container is a transient object. It might live on one server for a while and then get moved over to another if directed by an orchestrator tool. While a container keeps its bundle of application software and dependencies during its lifecycle, it usually does not keep application data within the container. Nor should it. After all, in this model a container is designed to run only what is needed and when it is needed. When done, the container is allowed (in fact encouraged) to disappear. If an application’s data were held inside that same application container, too, then pfft!

That’s a challenge.