How Anzo Maximizes the Power of Kubernetes for the Modern Enterprise Data Fabric
Chances are good that any given article about application containers will include a photo of shipping containers sailing on a barge. It’s a solid metaphor, if somewhat overused: Like shipping containers, application containers are efficient, portable and do not interfere with the contents of other containers – all essential benefits when deploying software.
Many enterprise applications, however, are by necessity much more complex, made up of multiple containers that handle different aspects of the application. Some containers handle computing, others are for databases, workflows, storage and so on. In this much more complicated scenario, app containers are a lot less like shipping containers on a barge and more like passengers on a cruise ship, all wanting to do different activities at the same time.
Somehow these multiple containers need to be managed into a functional whole. That's where Kubernetes comes in. If your containers are passengers on a cruise, then Kubernetes is the cruise director you need!1
Kubernetes provides a critical new level of orchestration across containers, automatically deploying, connecting and optimizing the many containers that comprise a high-demand enterprise application.
Read on and discover how Anzo's use of Kubernetes is central to Anzo's highly flexible data fabric architecture.
Here at Cambridge Semantics, we are actively utilizing the container orchestration power of Kubernetes for the Anzo platform. Anzo provides modern data discovery and integration that makes the enterprise data fabric possible. Anzo enables users to quickly integrate and access new combinations of diverse data – structured and unstructured alike – using semantic graph models to support advanced analytics and business insight.
Anzo provides enterprises with a data fabric platform that delivers accelerated data integration, whether that data is structured or unstructured, internal or external. To make this happen, Anzo must enable dynamic onboarding, blending, and microservice delivery of arbitrarily large combinations of graph-based integrated data that match user specifications on demand. Anzo deploys on Kubernetes to support these critical capabilities, by automating the scaling and management of the computing resources needed across the enterprise, across multiple platforms. This strategy has been advocated by leading analysts; notably Gartner:
The separation of storage and compute is becoming the key to managing data across a hybrid/multi-cloud environment. This means that data fabrics now require automation to manage and orchestrate their data pipelines that often traverse organizational boundaries and ecosystems.
~ Gartner2
The benefits of Kubernetes with Anzo to maximize enterprise scalability, agility and cost effectiveness are compelling. Here is just a sampling of the benefits delivered by Anzo's use of Kubernetes for your organization:
- Maximized cost-efficiency of cloud-based resources used for Anzo deployments. By automatically creating and deleting right-sized clusters on-demand in response to users' real-time requests, Anzo allows organizations to use cloud-based resources when needed while also avoiding wasteful and costly retention of those resources when they are no longer required. New clusters can be created on-demand to support new analytic loads, increasing data volumes or new users and then shut down quickly once no longer needed.
- Create, manage, and query arbitrarily large knowledge graphs efficiently. Previously, managing the computing resources necessary to create and query large graph databases was costly, impractical, or technically infeasible. Deployed on Kubernetes, Anzo's built-in massively parallel processing (MPP) graph engine can expand to load, and query graphs of tens to hundreds of billions of nodes and relationships on-demand.
- Achieve the benefits of data virtualization with the performance of data warehousing. Kubernetes support allows Anzo to make just those specific datasets needed for a particular query or analytic load available to users in seconds. Doing so eliminates the high cost and maintenance overhead of traditional data warehouses, while also gaining entirely new business insights and discoveries that legacy data warehouses simply cannot match.
Kubernetes is deservedly gaining rapid adoption by infrastructure and DevOps professionals for its unprecedented ease in automatically deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications at massive scale. We invite you to discover the details on how Anzo has leveraged the power of Kubernetes to provide you with the leading modern data integration and discovery platform that will make your organization's voyage towards a new transformative enterprise data fabric a successful one.
(1) Serdar Yegulalp, Kubernetes vs. Docker: Understand Containers and Orchestration, InfoWorld (30 Oct 2019).
(2) Ehtisham Zaidi et al, Data Fabrics Add Augmented Intelligence to Modernize Your Data Integration, Gartner (17 Dec 2019). Available for download from Cambridge Semantics.
