The realization that container applications needed persistent storage led the container orchestrators, storage vendors and development community to work on a method to deliver that storage. They came up with the Container Storage Interface (CSI), a standard that defines a common set of interfaces. CSI enables storage vendors to write plug-ins that work across Container Orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Apache Mesos.

CSIs have been embraced by most storage vendors, both traditional companies looking to make their systems container-ready and relative newcomers creating container-native storage that runs inside Kubernetes. There are now over 100 storage systems with CSI drivers for Kubernetes. By writing CSI drivers, storage vendors can bring functionality for container storage without having to integrate with each container orchestrator.

While CSI is a common interface for container storage and provides broad industry support, it does not yet cover more advanced enterprise storage features such as data reduction, synchronous replication, resiliency for node failure, alerting and analytics.

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