Pure Storage and AWS have a 3-year deal to use Portworx container management software with Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and so provide enterprise scale containerised apps in Amazon’s cloudy IT empire.
EKS provides a basic capability to run and scale Kubernetes on AWS with no need to install, operate, and maintain a Kubernetes control plane or nodes. Pure’s Portworx software is layered on top of that to add services such as persistent storage, data protection, disaster recovery, data security, cross-region and hybrid data migrations, and automated capacity management.
Deepak Singh, AWS VP of Compute Services, said of the deal: “We are excited to work with Portworx to provide customers another option for backup and data management on Amazon EKS.”
Reed Glauser, director of engineering at CHG Healthcare, provided a customer perspective: “As demand for healthcare workers skyrocketed, we needed to rapidly deliver new digital tools that better serve our customers, who count on us to provide more than 30 per cent of the temporary medical employees in the United States. We started by migrating most of our technology infrastructure on AWS and adopting Kubernetes to develop, test, and deploy new applications, but we needed a storage layer that was as flexible as the other elements of our cloud-native stack.”
So: “Portworx added the capabilities to Amazon EKS we needed, enabling us to optimize and automate our storage management, spin up new clusters and migrate seamlessly, and significantly accelerate and streamline our cloud development life cycle.”
There are two parts of the Portwork offering involved here. Portworx Enterprise enables users to request storage based on their requirements for capacity, performance level, resiliency level, security level and access, protection level, and more. Portworx PX-Backup adds point-and-click backup and recovery for all applications running on Kubernetes, even stateless ones.
The Pure-AWS deal includes Pure announcing an Early Access Program for Portworx Backup as-a-Service (BaaS) on AWS. Pure says Portworx BaaS is one of the many as-a-Service offerings the company will deliver to its customers in the future.
The pair’s deal, which they called a strategic engagement, means Pure gets AWS’ blessing for its Portworx software, which should help sales (shorter term win), and AWS gets a Portworx on-ramp to its cloud for Pure customers looking to go cloud-native (longer term win).
Will Pure look for similar arrangements with Azure and the Google cloud? Will AWS look for similar arrangements with HPE and NetApp and others? Watch this space. The (cloudy) sky’s the limit.
