Storage Fabric

The Liqo storage fabric subsystem enables the seamless offloading of stateful workloads to remote clusters. The solution is based on two main pillars:

  • Storage binding deferral until its first consumer is scheduled onto a given cluster (either local or remote). This ensures that new storage pools are created in the exact location where their associated pods have just been scheduled onto for execution.

  • Data gravity, entering in action in the subsequent scheduling processes, and involving a set of automatic policies to attract pods in the appropriate cluster. This guarantees that pods requesting existing pools of storage (e.g., following a restart) are scheduled onto the cluster physically hosting the corresponding data.

These approaches extend standard Kubernetes practice to multi-cluster scenarios, simplifying at the same time the configuration of high availability and disaster recovery scenarios. To this end, one relevant use-case is represented by database instances that need to be replicated and synchronized across different clusters, which is shown in the stateful applications example.

Under the hood, the Liqo storage fabric leverages a virtual storage class, which embeds the logic to create the appropriate storage pools in the different clusters. Whenever a new PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) associated with the virtual storage class is created, and its consumer is bound to a (possibly virtual) node, the Liqo logic goes into action, based on the target node:

  • If it is a local node, PVC operations are remapped to a second one, associated with the corresponding real storage class, to transparently provision the requested volume.

  • In case of virtual nodes, the reflection logic is responsible for creating the remote shadow PVC, remapped to the negotiated storage class, and synchronizing the PersistentVolume information, to allow pod binding.

In both cases, locality constraints are automatically embedded within the resulting PersistentVolumes (PVs), to make sure each pod is scheduled only onto the cluster where the associated storage pools are available.

Additional details about the configuration of the Liqo storage fabric, as well as concerning the possibility to move storage pools among clusters through the Liqo CLI tool, are presented in the stateful applications usage section.

Note

In addition to the provided storage class, Liqo supports the execution of pods leveraging cross-cluster storage managed by external solutions (e.g., persistent volumes provided by the cloud provider infrastructure).