Have you ever heard the term persistent storage and wondered what that means? The concept is not that difficult to understand.
Persistent storage is a system that keeps data stored even after its power is turned off. It’s also called nonvolatile storage at times. Persistent storage is required for us to be able to store all our necessary files and data for future use.
We have created an extensive guide with all information you might need about persistent storage.
What Is Persistent Storage?
Persistent storage is storage that keeps the data stored in itself even when the system is turned off. It is a fundamental component of any storage system, whether shared or networked, single drive, or cloud storage.
Magnetic media, including hard disc drives, tapes, and various optical media, including DVDs, are some of the most popular types of persistent storage and use files, blocks, or objects to save data in an organized format.
Types of Persistent Storage
There are two types of persistent storage based on the data they store, described as follows.
Type #1: Persistent Storage in Containerization
Containerization is a popular method of packaging software and operating systems into portable, isolated modules built and destroyed as frequently as needed.
At first, containers did not support persistent storage, which meant all the data produced by a containerized app would vanish once the app finished running, and the container was destroyed afterward.
However, in recent years, software and storage providers have developed techniques to save the data produced by container applications and keep it secure in well-known storage volumes. Retaining these transient storage volumes is a problem that is resolved with the use of persistence storage.
Type #2: Persistent Storage in Kubernetes
Kubernetes is mainly an open-source container orchestration framework. In a cloud/cluster environment, it provides the management and service capabilities needed to deploy, run, and grow containers effectively.
The key benefit of Kubernetes storage is that it enables storage administrators to manage various types of persistent and non-persistent data in a Kubernetes cluster. In addition, it allows them to develop dynamic storage resources that support different application types.
If adequately managed, Kubernetes storage may be used to automatically provision the best storage to various applications at a low administrative cost.
Advantages of Persistent Storage
Persistent storage has offered us various benefits, as stated below.
Advantage #1: Flexibility
Unlike traditional storage, persistent storage gives you much more freedom and allows you to utilize the same software across many virtual machines, clouds, and containers. Additionally, it gives developers the freedom to select the best storage interface for their workload among file, block, or object storage.
Moreover, it enables developers to supply data services using a single system, regardless of protocol, increasing productivity, providing more freedom, and developing more successful applications.
Advantage #2: Cost-Effectiveness
Using persistent storage, you only need to pay for the storage and computation you utilize, as it grows and shrinks automatically as you add and remove files, per your needs, without disruption.
Advantage #3: Portability
In today’s cloud-native environment, organizations need to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy to combine the advantages of public and on-premises clouds. With persistent storage, stateless apps and data can be easily moved between various clouds.
Advantage #4: Security
To safeguard them against any type of data loss and security breaches, persistent storage complies with the security needs of most businesses in terms of volume-level encryption, self-encrypting discs, and key management, among other features.
Advantage #5: Efficiency
The efficiency of application development is significantly increased by persistent storage. It dispenses the need to rewrite apps when moving them from one cloud provider to another, and you can relocate applications whenever you want without spending money or time on rewrites.
Advantage #6: Simplicity
Developers can provision their storage with persistent storage without needing to be storage experts, allowing simple volume provisioning for both public cloud and on-premise services.
What Is Non-Persistent Storage?
Data that can be deleted when a container, worker node, or cluster is removed is stored in non-persistent storage. Non-persistent storage is frequently used for logging data, including system logs and container logs, development testing, or when you need to retrieve data from the host’s file system.
Summary
In this guide, we have discussed what persistent storage is in detail. We’ve also discussed the types of persistent storage, their advantages, and the definition of Non-persistent storage.
Hopefully, with the help of this article, you’ve learned everything you need to know about persistent storage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Some forms of solid-state storage, most notably the RAM and cache chips, are often non-persistent (volatile) storage devices. The data they contain is wiped when the devices’ regular power supply is turned off.
Persistence is defined as the continuation of an effect after its cause is removed. It indicates that data continues to exist after its creation process has been concluded.
