Containers are sweeping the datacentre. They’re a lightweight method of virtualising applications and allow for rapid scaling and contain all that’s needed to run processes in a multitude of environments with few dependencies.
But they need storage. And while containers were originally conceived of to have storage as stateless as themselves, it soon became apparent that containerised applications needed to retain data for longer.
So, a variety of ways of achieving persistent storage for containers – largely represented by Docker and the container orchestrator Kubernetes, though there are others available – have been developed.