New Container Storage Options for AKS

• Azure Container Storage, in preview, provides improved storage utilization and cost-efficiency for stateful containers on Azure Kubernetes Service.
• The service can store persistent data from containers using a variety of storage protocols and media.
• Container Storage is yet another service that can lock developers into Azure despite the mobility promised by standards like Kubernetes.

Container applications running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) often use external storage services such as Azure SQL Database for application data. However, maintaining persistent session state—such as the contents of a shopping cart or the current game score—has presented challenges. ACS, a fully managed Azure service, provides a simplified interface to an arbitrary amount and number of underlying storage devices that can be leveraged by container-based workloads hosted in AKS.

Challenges Addressed by ACS

In the past, developers who needed storage for container applications added storage drivers to the Kubernetes source code—called “in-tree” storage—which tied the storage to specific external storage services and required deep knowledge of Kubernetes.