Running an OpenStack platform is a never ending story of debugging and searching for the best possible components, including the storage subsystem. It is very naive to think that OpenStack is just about a one-time installation and running of GUI or API interfaces.

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At the beginning of 2016, our Operations team started investigating other storage options. We had a lot of requirements – a solution that is stable, reliable, fast, predictable, can scale horizontally and vertically, doesn’t kill all the resources, is manageable, integratable with our metrics and monitoring systems, extendable and transparent (so no black box dependency on a single vendor). That is the point where DRBD came into play as a possible underlying technology.

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We’ve been overfed with projections about the long-term growth of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS markets, how enterprises are moving their infrastructures to the cloud and building cloud-ready applications.

IDC, 451 Research, TBR and other providers of market intelligence and analysis constantly forecast double-digit growth of public and private clouds at the expense of traditional IT spending – and they’re right.

From what we’ve seen in the last couple of years, companies of all sizes – from SMEs to global enterprises – are moving their technologies to various forms of cloud infrastructure and this trend is not going to stop any time soon. In fact, it is just a matter of time before the majority of applications will be sitting in the cloud.

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