CI/CD Pipelines with Cloud Volumes ONTAP Case Studies

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is helping organizations across the world achieve data efficiency and agility in the cloud as part of their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows. In this blog we’ll introduce you to three companies using this technology to make their development and release cycles faster and less expensive.

Below we look into how Cloud Volumes is solving the CI/CD pipelines challenges at these companies:

• Migrating and Reducing Costs for a Semiconductor Designer with AWS
• Provisioning Kubernetes Persistent Storage on Google Cloud at a Major Electronics Manufacturer
• High Performance AWS Storage for a Data Visualization SaaS Company

Storage Challenges for CI/CD Pipelines

As a DevOps practice, CI/CD pipelines play a key role in enabling agility in development. However, CI/CD does come with some challenges associated with the underlying storage layer. In heterogeneous environments, data is spread across multiple clouds and on-premises environments—the CI/CD pipelines should be operational across all of them.

The storage solution should also work at cloud-speed, enabling operations such as quick provisioning and update configuration without impacting performance and availability. Rapidly changing environments and faster release cycles also need features such as cloning, replication, persistent volume allocation for containers, and more to be taken care of efficiently and with minimal overhead, to avoid slowing down the release cycle. That makes identifying stable data management solutions that can integrate well with CI/CD pipelines important.

Let’s see how Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps companies overcome these CI/CD challenges by looking at three customer success stories.

CI/CD Customer Success Stories with Cloud Volumes ONTAP

A Major Electronics Manufacturer  Provisions Kubernetes Persistent Storage on Google Cloud

This multinational electronics company is a global innovator in technology and manufacturing, with operations across the world. Their production is diverse: besides offering technology solutions it is a major manufacturer of electronics for home entertainment, mobile communications, home appliances, air solutions, and vehicle components.

The company was developing a visual AI solution which would be delivered as a SaaS offering. This SaaS would leverage Google Cloud Anthos and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as part of the company’s hybrid cloud infrastructure. The engineering team was looking for an efficient storage platform to address requirements from different groups and branches located around the world. The storage solution also had to integrate with their on-premises storage infrastructure. Another key requirement was the ability to integrate the storage solution into their CI/CD pipeline and have it easily connect to their Kubernetes architecture.

With Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Google Cloud they gained a number of benefits:

• Hybrid deployment: the company found a way to integrate their on-premises storage array to Google Cloud.
• Persistent Volumes for Kubernetes: They used the NetApp-developed Trident technology to automate the deployment and dynamic provisioning of persistent storage volumes for GKE.
• Ease of Use: Data was replicated from on-premises to Google Cloud and back with just a few clicks of the NetApp Cloud Manager console. This architecture enabled the quick and agile deployment of the SaaS solution, integrating with their existing CI/CD processes. Making things even easier for developers, all of Cloud Manager’s GUI capabilities can be carried out programmatically with RESTful API calls.

Data Visualization SaaS  Company Scales with AWS High Performance Storage

This interactive data visualization software company focuses on solutions that deliver business intelligence. Their solution is delivered as an online SaaS platform.

The company initially deployed their own custom SMB solution on AWS based on Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD)—an open-source solution for HA storage clusters. But as their data operation scaled, they were challenged to overcome some of the limitations of DRBD and the underlying AWS storage infrastructure. One example was a requirement to create storage pools to expand beyond the 16 TB limit of AWS io1 EBS disks—however, their DRBD-based system couldn’t handle the performance demands of this setup and they experienced several downtime events.

With Cloud Volumes ONTAP as their storage solution in AWS, the company was able to overcome the performance, scalability and resilience challenges their previous deployment has faced.

• High performance, low latency storage: Latency was reduced thanks to NetApp’s NVMe-based intelligent caching technology.
• High Availability and business continuity: RPO=0, RTO < 60-second data availability was ensured, thanks to the multi-AZ HA architecture. The solution also delivered the required security with data encryption in-rest and in-flight.
• Infrastructure-as-code Terraform deployment: One of the key capabilities that helped the development team was support for their IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tool of choice—Terraform. Cloud Manager APIs and automation capabilities allowed them to automate the deployment as well as their DevOps CI/CD pipelines. This saved them a significant amount of time and effort and accelerated their development cycles in the cloud.
• Using FlexClone®, developers can gain more reusability by creating data volume clones that only consume storage space for changes.

Semiconductor Designer  Migrates to AWS and Reduce Costs

This company is a leading semiconductor chip designer, supplying the processors that can be found in a wide majority of the smartphones in use today. As a chip designer, their data estate is enormous, and keeping it on-premises was becoming a cost concern. That’s what led to the decision to migrate to the cloud leveraging Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

The company wanted to migrate its embedded OS development platform environment from on-premises to AWS. This needed to be done while the service was still in use by its 400,000 active users and needed to maintain all of the development features that provided IoT connectivity in their chips. They had 25 TB of data distributed across 10+ billion files that needed to migrate to AWS and do so while keeping in sync, as development and production needed to proceed unhindered.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP was able to solve these challenges with a number of benefits:

• Easy migration: SnapMirror® technology was used to replicate the data seamlessly from their on-premises environments to Cloud Volumes ONTAP in AWS.
• Reduced transfer and storage costs: Thanks to Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s space efficiency features, such as deduplication and compression, the company reduced the overall size of the data they needed to migrate from 25 TB to 9 TB, greatly enhancing the speed of the migration to AWS and reducing storage costs moving forward.
• Automatically tiered data: Data tiering to less-expensive Amazon S3 storage automatically also provides significant cost savings. When the data is needed again, Cloud Volumes ONTAP seamlessly moves it back to high performance AWS EBS disks.
• Added data protection: Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides a layer of features that go beyond the cloud-native storage services, such as cost-efficient backups and instant snapshots.

Read more about how Cloud Volumes ONTAP solves chip design challenges here.

Conclusion

Cloud Volumes ONTAP ticks all the boxes when it comes to storage capabilities required for your CI/CD workflows—be it high availability, data protection, quick provisioning, or integration with Kubernetes automation. Irrespective of your application use case, Cloud Volumes ONTAP can easily fit it and accelerate the solution delivery.

To learn more, check out this article on the CI/CD storage challenges and how Cloud Volumes ONTAP help to address them.