Storageless, much like with serverless computing, abstracts the underlying infrastructure away from the developer while a 3rd party is responsible for dynamically managing and allocating storage resources.
Legacy storage management
Modern cloud applications are scalable and flexible, and they need infrastructure that is as dynamic as the applications themselves. Storage resources, however, are static and hard to maintain. Changing storage to match application demands whether to due to seasonality, daily demand or unforeseen spikes in traffic, involves many manual tasks and can be difficult to do. As such, storage optimization rarely happens. Resources are pre-purchased, and to support scaling applications, storage volumes are often over-provisioned, both in size and performance. This approach, while ensuring applications can handle a scaling bursts, gives application inflexible and unoptimized infrastructure while unused resources drive up costs.
Hands-free storage
Just as workloads request varying types of compute resources (CPU, GPU, memory) they also request storage resources with different properties for size, shape and access modes. With storageless, the allocation of these resources is dynamically managed by a third-party service, based on how the application is consuming them, not on pre-purchased units. In this approach, the application sets the behavior of storage infrastructure, while volumes are automatically provisioned, allocated and optimized for high performance and low costs.
The promise of storageless infrastructure is to shift operational responsibilities of storage maintenance away from application owners, allowing them to build and run applications without needing to architect the size and shape of storage volumes. Developers and operators can focus on SLOs while their storageless service handles storage maintenance and management.
Go storageless with Spot
Spot offers storageless capabilities within our automated infrastructure management products, Elastigroup and Ocean. Spot Storage leverages advanced NetApp storage technologies to support workloads that are automated and dynamically optimized for high performance at the lowest possible cost.
To learn more, visit our Spot Storage page.
