That said, as Kubernetes adoption keeps growing in 2025, selecting the right storage solution is more important than ever. Enterprise-level features, data encryption, and high availability are at the forefront of the requirements we want to look into. The same is true for the ability to attach to multiple clients simultaneously and the built-in data loss protection.

Simplyblock: Enterprise Storage Platform for Kubernetes

Simplyblock™ is an enterprise-grade storage platform designed to cater to high-performance and scalability needs for storage in Kubernetes environments. Simplyblock is fully optimized to take advantage of modern NVMe devices. It utilizes the NVMe/TCP protocol to share its shared volumes between the storage cluster and clients, providing superior throughput and lower access latency than the alternatives.

Simplyblock is designed as a cloud-native solution and is highly integrated with Kubernetes through its Simplyblock CSI driver. It supports dynamic provisioning, snapshots, clones, volume resizing, fully integrated encryption at rest, and many more. One benefit of simplyblock is its use of NVMe over TCP which is integrated into the Linux and Windows (Server 2025 or later) kernels, meaning no additional drivers. This also means it is easy to use simplyblock volumes outside of Kubernetes if you also operate virtual machines and would like to unify your storage. Furthermore, simplyblock volumes support read-write multi-attach. That means they can be attached to multiple pods, VMs, or both at the same time, making it easy to share data.

Its scale-out architecture provides full multi-tenant isolation, meaning that many customers can share the same storage backend. Logical volumes can be encrypted at rest either by an encryption key per tenant or even per logical volume, providing the strongest isolation option.

Deployment-wise, simplyblock offers the best of both worlds: disaggregated and hyperconverged setups. Simplyblock’s storage engine can be deployed on either a set of separate storage nodes, building a disaggregated storage cluster, or on Kubernetes worker nodes to utilize the worker node-local storage. Simplyblock also supports a mixed setup, where workloads can benefit from ultra-low latency with worker node-local storage (node-affinity) and the security and “spill-over” of the infinite storage from the disaggregated cluster.

As the only solution presented here, simplyblock favors erasure coding over replication for high availability and fault tolerance. Erasure coding is quite similar to RAID and uses parity information to achieve data loss protection. Simplyblock distributes this parity information across cluster nodes for higher fault tolerance. That said, erasure coding has a configuration similar to a replication factor, defining how many chunks and parity information will be used per calculation. This enables the best trade-off between data protection and storage overhead, enabling secure setups with as little as 50% additional storage requirements.

Furthermore, simplyblock provides a full multi-tier solution that caters to diverse storage needs in a single system. It enables you to utilize ultra-fast flash storage devices such as NVMe alongside slower SATA/SAS SSDs. At the same time, you can manage your long-term (cold) storage with traditional HDDs or QLC-based flash storage (slower but very high capacity).

Simplyblock is a robust choice if you need scalable, high-performance block storage for use cases such as databases, CDNs (Content Delivery Network), analytics solutions, and similar. Furthermore, simplyblock offers high throughput and low access latency. With its use of erasure coding, simplyblock is a great solution for companies seeking cost-effective storage while its ease of use allows organizations to adapt quickly to changing storage demands. For businesses seeking a modern, efficient, and Kubernetes-optimized block storage solution, simplyblock offers a compelling combination of features and performance.

Portworx: Kubernetes Storage and Data Management

Portworx is a cloud-native, software-defined storage platform that is highly integrated with Kubernetes. It is an enterprise-grade, closed-source solution that was acquired and is in active development by Pure Storage. Hence, its integration with the Pure Storage hardware appliances enables a performant, scalable storage option with integrated tiering capabilities.

Portworx integrated with Kubernetes through its native CSI driver and provides important CSI features such as dynamic provisioning, snapshots, clones, resizing, and persistent or ephemeral volumes. Furthermore, Portworx supports data-at-rest encryption and disaster recovery using synchronous and asynchronous cluster replication.

To enable fault tolerance and high availability, Portworx utilizes replicas, storing copies of data on different cluster nodes. This multiplies the required disk space by the replication factor. For the connection between the storage cluster and clients, Portworx provides access via iSCSI, a fairly old protocol that isn’t necessarily optimized for fast flash storage.

For connections between Pure’s FlashArray and Portworx, you can use NVMe/TCP or NVMe-RoCE (NVMe with RDMA over Converged Ethernet) — a mouthful, I know.

Encryption at rest is supported with either a unique key per volume or a cluster-wide encryption key. For storage-client communication, while iSCSI should be separated into its own VLAN, remember that iSCSI itself isn’t encrypted, meaning that encryption in transit isn’t guaranteed (if not pushed through a secured channel).

As mentioned, Portworx distinguishes itself by integrating with Pure Storage appliances. This integration enables organizations to leverage the performance and reliability of Pure’s flash storage systems. This makes Portworx a compelling choice for running critical stateful applications such as databases, message queues, and analytics platforms in Kubernetes, especially if you don’t fear operating hardware appliances. While available as a pure software-defined storage solution, Portworx excels in combination with Pure’s hardware, making it a great choice for databases, high-throughput message queues, and analytical applications on Kubernetes.

Ceph: Open-source, Distributed Storage System

Ceph is a highly scalable and distributed storage solution. Run as a company-backed open-source project, Ceph presents a unified storage platform with support for block, object, and file storage. That makes it a versatile choice for a wide range of Kubernetes applications.

Ceph’s Kubernetes integration is provided through the ceph-csi driver, which brings dynamically provisioned persistent volumes and automatic lifecycle management. CSI features supported by Ceph include snapshotting, cloning, resizing, and encryption.

The architecture of Ceph is built to be self-healing and self-managing, mainly designed to enable infinite disk space scalability. The provided access latency, while not on the top end, is good enough for many use cases. Running workloads like databases, which love high IOPS and low latency, can feel a bit laggy, though. Finally, high availability and fault tolerance are implemented through replication between Ceph cluster nodes.

From the security end, Ceph supports encryption at rest via a few different options. I’d recommend using the LUKS-based (Linux Unified Key Setup) setup as it supports all of the different Ceph storage options. The communication between cluster nodes, as well as storage and client, is not encrypted by default. If you require encryption in transit (and you should), utilize SSH and SSL termination via HAproxy or similar solutions. It’s unfortunate that a storage solution as big as Ceph has no such built-in support. The same goes for multi-tenancy, which can be achieved using RADOS namespaces but isn’t an out-of-the-box solution.

Ceph is an excellent choice as your Kubernetes storage when you are looking for an open-source solution with a proven track record of enterprise deployments, infinite storage scalability, and versatile storage types. It is not a good choice if you are looking for high-performance storage with low latency and millions of IOPS.

Moreover, due to its community-driven development and support, Ceph can be operated as a cost-effective and open-source alternative to proprietary storage solutions. Whether you’re deploying in a private data center, a public cloud, or a hybrid environment, Ceph’s adaptability is a great help for managing storage in containerized ecosystems.

Commercial support for Ceph is available from Red Hat.

Longhorn: Cloud-native Block Storage for Kubernetes

Longhorn is an open-source, cloud-native storage solution specifically designed for Kubernetes. It provides block storage that focuses on flexibility and ease of use. Therefore, Longhorn deploys straight into your Kubernetes cluster, providing worker node-local storage as persistent volumes.

As a cloud-native storage solution, Longhorn provides its own CSI driver, highly integrated with Longhorn and Kubernetes. It enables dynamic provisioning and management of persistent volumes, snapshots, clones, and backups. For the latter, people seem to have some complications with restores, so make sure to test your recovery processes.

For communication between storage and clients, Longhorn uses the iSCSI protocol. A newer version of the storage engine is in the works, which enables NVMe over TCP, however, at the time of writing, this engine isn’t yet production-ready and is not recommended for production use.

Anyhow, Longhorn provides good access latency and throughput, making it a great solution for mid-size databases and similar workloads. Encryption at rest can be set up but isn’t as simple as with some alternatives. High availability and fault tolerance is achieved by replicating data between cluster nodes. That means, as with many other solutions, the required storage is multiplied by the replication factor. However, Longhorn supports incremental backups to external storage systems like S3 for easy data protection and fast recoverability in disaster scenarios.

Longhorn is a full open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It was originally developed by Rancher and is backed by SUSE. Hence, it’s commercially available with enterprise support as SUSE Storage.

Longhorn is a good choice if you want a lightweight, cloud-native, open-source solution that runs hyper-converged with your cluster workloads. It is usually used for smaller deployments or home labs — widely discussed on Reddit. Generally, it is not considered as robust as Ceph and, hence, is not recommended for mission-critical enterprise production workloads.

NFS: File Sharing Solution for Enterprises with Heterogeneous Environments

NFS (Network File System) is a well-known and widely adopted file-sharing protocol, inside and outside Kubernetes. That said, NFS has a proven track record showing its simplicity, reliability, and ability to provide shared access to persistent storage.

One of the main features of NFS is its ability to simultaneously attach volumes to many containers (and pods) with read-write access. That enables easy sharing of configuration, training data, or similar shared data sets between many instances or applications.

There are quite a few different options for integrating NFS with Kubernetes. The two main ones are the Kubernetes NFS Subdir External Provisioner. Both automatically create NFS subdirectories when new persistent volumes are requested, and the csi-driver-nfs. In addition, many storage solutions provide optimized NFS CSI drivers designed to provision shares for their respective solutions automatically. Such storage options include TrueNAS, OpenEBS, Dell EMC, and others.

High availability is one of the elements of NFS that isn’t simple, though. To make automatic failover work, additional tools like Corosync or Pacemaker need to be configured. On the client side, automount should be set up to handle automatic failover and reconnection. NFS is an old protocol from a time when those additional steps were commonplace. Today, they feel frumpy and out of place, especially compared to available alternatives.

While multi-tenancy isn’t strictly supported by NFS, using individual shares could be seen as a viable solution. However, remember that shares aren’t secured in any way. Authentication requires additional setups such as Kerberos. File access permissions shouldn’t be used as a sufficient setup for tenant isolation.

Encryption at rest with NFS comes down to the backing storage solution. NFS, as a sharing protocol, doesn’t offer anything by itself. Encryption in transit is supported, either via Kerberos or other means like TLS via stunnel. The implementation details differ per NFS provider, though. You should consult your provider’s manual.

NFS is your Kubernetes storage of choice if you need a simple, scalable, and shared file storage system that integrates seamlessly into your existing infrastructure. In the best case, you already have an NFS server set up and ready to go. Installing the CSI driver and configuring the storage class is all you need. While NFS might be a bottleneck for high-performance systems such as databases, many applications work perfectly fine. Imagine you need to scale out a WordPress-based website. There isn’t an easier way to share the same writable storage to many WP instances. That said, for organizations looking for a mature, battle-tested storage option to deliver shared storage with minimal complexity, NFS is the choice.

Make Your Kubernetes Storage Choice in 2025

Selecting the right storage solution for your Kubernetes persistent volume isn’t easy. It is an important choice to ensure performance, scalability, and reliability for your containerized workloads. Solutions like simplyblock™, Portworx, Ceph, Longhorn, and NFS offer a great set of features and are optimized for different use cases.

NFS is loved for its simplicity and easy multi-attach functionality. It is a great choice for all use cases needing shared write access. It’s not a great fit for high throughput and super-low access latency, though.

Ceph, on the other hand, is great if you need infinite scalability and don’t fear away from a slightly more complicated setup and operation. Ceph provides a robust choice for all use cases, as well as high-performance databases and similar IO-intensive applications.

Longhorn and Portworx are generally good choices for almost all types of applications. Both solutions provide good access latency and throughput. If you tend to buy hardware appliances, Portworx, in combination with Pure Storage, is the way to go. If you prefer pure software-defined storage and want to utilize storage available in your worker nodes, take a look at Longhorn.

Last but not least, simplyblock is your choice when running IO-hungry databases in or outside Kubernetes. Its use of the NVMe/TCP protocol makes it a perfect choice for pure container storage, as well as mixed environments with containers and virtual machines. Due to its low storage overhead for data protection, simplyblock is a great, cost-effective, and fast storage solution. And a bit of capacity always remains for all other storage needs, meaning a single solution will do it for you.

As Kubernetes evolves, leveraging the proper storage solution will significantly improve your application performance and resiliency. To ensure you make an informed decision for your short and long-term storage needs, consider factors like workload complexity, deployment scale, and data management needs.

Whether you are looking for a robust enterprise solution or a more simple and straightforward setup, these five options are all strong contenders to meet your Kubernetes storage demands in 2025.

The post 5 Storage Solutions for Kubernetes in 2025 appeared first on simplyblock.

Kubernetes storage is a sophisticated ecosystem designed to address the complex data management needs of containerized applications. At its core, Kubernetes storage provides a flexible mechanism to manage data across dynamic, distributed computing environments. It allows your containers to store, access, and persist data with unprecedented flexibility.

Storage Types in Kubernetes

Fundamentally, Kubernetes provides two types of storage: ephemeral volumes are bound to the container’s lifecycle, and persistent volumes survive a container restart or termination.

Ephemeral (Non-Persistent) Storage

Ephemeral storage represents the default storage mechanism in Kubernetes. It provides a temporary storage solution, existing only for the duration of a container’s lifecycle. Therefore, when a container is terminated or removed, all data stored in this temporary storage location is permanently deleted.

This type of storage is ideal for transient data that doesn’t require long-term preservation, such as temporary computation results or cache files. Most stateless workloads utilize ephemeral storage for these kinds of temporary data. That said, a “stateless workload” doesn’t necessarily mean no data is stored temporarily. It means there is no issue if this storage disappears from one second to the next.

Persistent Storage

Persistent storage is a critical concept in Kubernetes that addresses one of the fundamental challenges of containerized applications: maintaining data integrity and accessibility across dynamic and ephemeral computing environments.

Unlike ephemeral storage, which exists only for the lifetime of a container, persistent storage is not bound to the lifetime of a container. Hence, persistent storage provides a robust mechanism for storing and managing data that must survive container restarts, pod rescheduling, or even complete cluster redesigns. You enable persistent Kubernetes storage through the concepts of Persistent Volumes (PV) as well as Persistent Volume Claims (PVC).

Fundamental Kubernetes Storage Entities

Storage in Kubernetes is built up from multiple entities, depending on how storage is provided and if it is ephemeral or persistent.

Persistent Volumes (PV)

A Persistent Volume (PV) is a slice of storage in the Kubernetes cluster that has been provisioned by an administrator or dynamically created through a StorageClass. Think of a PV as a virtual storage resource that exists independently of any individual pod’s lifecycle. Consequently, this abstraction allows for several key capabilities:

• Lifecycle Independence: A PV exists even when the owner-pod is deleted, recreated, or moved to different nodes.
• Storage Type Abstraction: A PV is not bound to a specific storage technology. Hence, it can represent various storage types, including:
  • Network-attached storage (NFS)
  • Cloud provider storage solutions (AWS EBS, Azure Disk)
  • Local storage devices
  • Storage area networks (SAN)
  • Distributed storage systems

Persistent Volume Claims (PVC): Requesting Storage Resources

Persistent Volume Claims act as a user’s request for storage resources. Image your PVC as a demand for storage with specific requirements, similar to how a developer requests computing resources.

When a user creates a PVC, Kubernetes attempts to find and bind an appropriate Persistent Volume that meets the specified criteria. If no existing volume is found but a storage class is defined or a cluster-default one is available, the persistent volume will be dynamically allocated.

Key PersistentVolumeClaim Characteristics:

• Size Specification: Defines a user storage capacity request
• Access Modes: Defines how the volume can be accessed
  • ReadWriteOnce (RWO): Allows all pods on a single node to mount the volume in read-write mode.
  • ReadWriteOncePod: Allows a single pod to read-write mount the volume on a single node.
  • ReadOnlyMany (ROX): Allows multiple pods on multiple nodes to read the volume. Very practical for a shared configuration state.
  • ReadWriteMany (RWO): Allows multiple pods on multiple nodes to read and write to the volume. Remember, this could be dangerous for databases and other applications that don’t support a shared state.
• StorageClass: Allows requesting specific types of storage based on performance, redundancy, or other characteristics

The Container Storage Interface (CSI)

The Container Storage Interface (CSI) represents a pivotal advancement in Kubernetes storage architecture. Before CSI, integrating storage devices with Kubernetes was a complex and often challenging process that required a deep understanding of both storage systems and container orchestration.

The Container Storage Interface introduces a standardized approach to storage integration. Storage providers (commonly referred to as CSI drivers) are so-called out-of-process entities that communicate with Kubernetes via an API. The integration of CSI into the Kubernetes ecosystem provides three major benefits:

1. CSI provides a vendor-neutral, extensible plugin architecture
2. CSI simplifies the process of adding new storage systems to Kubernetes
3. CSI enables third-party storage providers to develop and maintain their own storage plugins without modifying Kubernetes core code

Volumes: The Basic Storage Units

In Kubernetes, volumes are fundamental storage entities that solve the problem of data persistence and sharing between containers. Unlike traditional storage solutions, Kubernetes volumes are not limited to a single type of storage medium. They can represent:

• Network file systems
• Local storage devices
• Cloud storage services
• Custom storage implementations such as simplyblock

Volumes provide a flexible abstraction layer that allows applications to interact with storage resources without being directly coupled to the underlying storage infrastructure.

StorageClasses: Dynamic Storage Provisioning

StorageClasses represent a powerful abstraction that enables dynamic and flexible storage provisioning because they allow cluster administrators to define different types of storage services with varying performance characteristics, such as:

• High-performance SSD storage
• Economical magnetic drive storage
• Geo-redundant cloud storage solutions

When a user requests storage through a PVC, Kubernetes tries to find an existing persistent volume. If none was found, the appropriate StorageClass defines how to automatically provision a suitable storage resource, significantly reducing administrative overhead.

Best Practices for Kubernetes Storage Management

1. Resource Limitation
   • Implement strict resource quotas
   • Control storage consumption across namespaces
   • Set clear boundaries for storage requests
2. Configuration Recommendations
   • Always use Persistent Volume Claims in container configurations
   • Maintain a default StorageClass
   • Use meaningful and descriptive names for storage classes
3. Performance and Security Considerations
   • Implement quality of service (QoS) controls
   • Create isolated storage environments
   • Enable multi-tenancy through namespace segregation

Practical Storage Provisioning Example

While specific implementations vary, here’s a conceptual example of storage provisioning using Helm:

helm install storage-solution storage-provider/csi-driver \
  --set storage.size=100Gi \
  --set storage.type=high-performance \
  --set access.mode=ReadWriteMany

Kubernetes Storage with Simplyblock CSI: Practical Implementation Guide

Simplyblock is a storage platform for stateful workloads such as databases, message queues, data warehouses, file storage, and similar. Therefore, simplyblock provides many features tailored to the use cases, simplifying deployments, improving performance, or enabling features such as instant database clones.

Basic Installation Example

When deploying storage in a Kubernetes environment, organizations need a reliable method to integrate storage solutions seamlessly. The Simplyblock CSI driver installation process begins by adding the Helm repository, which allows teams to easily access and deploy the storage infrastructure. By creating a dedicated namespace called simplyblock-csi, administrators ensure clean isolation of storage-related resources from other cluster components.

The installation command specifies critical configuration parameters that connect the Kubernetes cluster to the storage backend. The unique cluster UUID identifies the specific storage cluster, while the API endpoint provides the connection mechanism. The secret token ensures secure authentication, and the pool name defines the initial storage pool where volumes will be provisioned. This approach allows for a standardized, secure, and easily repeatable storage deployment process.

Here’s an example of installing the Simplyblock CSI driver:

helm repo add simplyblock-csi https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simplyblock-io/simplyblock-csi/master/charts

helm repo update

helm install -n simplyblock-csi --create-namespace \
  simplyblock-csi simplyblock-csi/simplyblock-csi \
  --set csiConfig.simplybk.uuid=[random-cluster-uuid] \
  --set csiConfig.simplybk.ip=[cluster-ip] \
  --set csiSecret.simplybk.secret=[random-cluster-secret] \
  --set logicalVolume.pool_name=[cluster-name]

Advanced Configuration Scenarios

1. Performance-Optimized Storage Configuration

Modern applications often require precise control over storage performance, making custom StorageClasses invaluable.

Firstly, by creating a high-performance storage class, organizations can define exact performance characteristics for different types of workloads. The configuration sets a specific IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) limit of 5000, ensuring that applications receive consistent and predictable storage performance.

Secondly, bandwidth limitations of 500 MB/s prevent any single application from monopolizing storage resources, promoting fair resource allocation. The added encryption layer provides an additional security measure, protecting sensitive data at rest. This approach allows DevOps teams to create storage resources that precisely match application requirements, balancing performance, security, and resource management.

# Example StorageClass configuration
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: high-performance-storage
provisioner: csi.simplyblock.io
parameters:
  qos_rw_iops: "5000"    # High IOPS performance
  qos_rw_mbytes: "500"   # Bandwidth limit
  encryption: "True"      # Enable encryption

2. Multi-Tenant Storage Setup

As a large organization or cloud provider, you require a robust environment and workload separation mechanism. For that reason, teams organize workloads between development, staging, and production environments by creating a dedicated namespace for production applications.

Therefore, the custom storage class for production workloads ensures critical applications have access to dedicated storage resources with specific performance and distribution characteristics.

The distribution configuration with multiple network domain controllers (NDCs) provides enhanced reliability and performance. Indeed, this approach supports complex enterprise requirements by enabling granular control over storage resources, improving security, and ensuring that production workloads receive the highest quality of service.

# Namespace-based storage isolation
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: production-apps

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: encrypted-volume
  annotations:
    simplybk/secret-name: encrypted-volume-keys
spec:
  storageClassName: encrypted-storage
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 50Gi

Multipath Storage Configuration

Network resilience is a critical consideration in enterprise storage solutions. Hence, multipath storage configuration provides redundancy by allowing multiple network paths for storage communication. By enabling multipathing and specifying a default network interface, organizations can create more robust storage infrastructures that can withstand network interruptions.

The caching node creation further enhances performance by providing an intelligent caching layer that can improve read and write operations. Furthermore, this configuration supports load balancing and reduces potential single points of failure in the storage network.

cachingnode:
  create: true
  multipathing: true
  ifname: eth0  # Default network interface

Best Practices for Kubernetes Storage with Simplyblock

1. Always specify a unique pool name for each storage configuration
2. Implement encryption for sensitive workloads
3. Use QoS parameters to control storage performance
4. Leverage multi-tenancy features for environment isolation
5. Regularly monitor storage node capacities and performance

Deletion and Cleanup

# Uninstall the CSI driver
helm uninstall "simplyblock-csi" --namespace "simplyblock-csi"

# Remove the namespace
kubectl delete namespace simplyblock-csi

The examples demonstrate the flexibility of Kubernetes storage, showcasing how administrators can fine-tune storage resources to meet specific application requirements while maintaining performance, security, and scalability. Try simplyblock for the most flexible Kubernetes storage solution on the market today.

The post Kubernetes Storage 201: Concepts and Practical Examples appeared first on simplyblock.