Alternatives to EBS for block storage in AWS

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Title: Kubernetes-based alternatives to EBS block storage in AWS

If you're running a Kubernetes cluster in AWS it's a no brainer to use EBS for persistent pod storage, right? If we introduce another option the answer might not be so obvious.

EBS has a number of issues: its slow for high IOPS workloads even with IOPS-optimized volumes, detaching and re-attaching volumes on pod restarts takes forever and does not work across availability zones, and EBS snapshots are slow and interfere with I/O traffic on the volumes.

In this talk we'll walkthrough how to run Kubernetes on AWS without using EBS. We will bootstrap an independent storage cluster that runs on top of Kubernetes and exposes Persistent Volumes to other pods. The storage cluster will use instance storage on EC2 instances as backing storage. It can take advantage of a new class of instances that are NVMe based for high IOPS workloads. Finally, given that you're already paying for EC2 instances there is a sunk cost argument to leveraging the instance storage attached to them.

Bio:
Bassam Tabbara is the CTO of Quantum Corporation, a world-class leader in storage. He is spearheading a number of storage 
projects including Rook. Prior to Quantum, Bassam was the CTO and co-founder of Symform, a P2P storage startup
acquired by Quantum. Prior to that he was at Microsoft where he lead a number of key initiatives as part of Microsoft
Research, Azure, Windows Server, and Visual Studio.