On March 20th, 2019, PortWorx announced it had raised a $27 million Series C investment, backed by a number of Venture Capital investment firms, as well as traditional storage vendors Cisco, HPE and NetApp.
Portworx CEO and co-founder, Murli Thirumale, identified three broader trends in customer’s cloud native journeys.
Being successful with Kubernetes depends on enterprise applications support
Enterprises are adopting Kubernetes at break-neck speeds, because the technology supports them in their building digital, cloud-native, products. The ability to quickly develop and release new software to customers is fast becoming a commodity customer expectation. But Kubernetes is far for enterprise-ready, according to Murli:
“I’d estimate that popular Kubernetes distributions and services are a great fit for only about 5-10% of enterprise applications. What that means is that from the perspective of a CIO who is trying to balance agility with security and reliability, Kubernetes alone is still a niche platform.”
The culprit? Enterprises are rich in data and stateful applications. Stateless applications and architectures, in the enterprise, are still far from commonplace; vanilla Kubernetes is still not a mature data storage platform.
Build vs. Buy is no longer a big discussion for container storage
Building a home-grown solution for stateful applications and data storage on top of Kubernetes yourself is complex, takes a lot of time and will distract developers and engineers from developing and releasing customer-facing applications.
The classic build vs. buy argument leans strongly towards buying an off-the-shelf solution, to minimize risk and lead time, and preventing headlines in the news because you lost, corrupted or leaked data.
The PortWorx data platform provides persistent container storage, including data management, elastic scaling, shared volumes, disaster recovery, data migration and more features. These features allow running the traditional, stateful, applications on top of Kubernetes without changing developer workflows or microservice architectures.
Kubernetes is the next enterprise IT platform
Looking at the support of leading enterprise IT vendors Cisco, HPE and NetApp, in this latest Series C investment round, it becomes obvious the industry is moving towards Kubernetes as the next enterprise IT platform.
Kubernetes will mature in the coming years, solving core issues in data security, business continuity, compliance and more.