Most discussions about PVC focus on on-prem deployments, but many of these technologies are equally relevant in the cloud, especially when using managed block storage like AWS EBS, which caps at around 64K IOPS.
By contrast, OpenEBS LocalPV (ZFS or LVM) can attach directly to NVMe-backed local disks, unlocking true NVMe performance (>1M IOPS), up to 15× faster than EBS.
👉 This makes ZFS LocalPV a must-know option for anyone running Kubernetes on AWS, GCP, or Azure, particularly for workloads like Kafka, Cassandra, or MongoDB, which already handle replication at the application level. In such cases, you don’t need a replicated storage backend (Ceph, EBS, etc.) and removing that extra layer can dramatically reduce latency and cost.
🧱 Ceph RBD
- Type: Distributed block storage (RADOS Block Device)
- Pros:
- Cons:
- Best for: large multi-node clusters needing strong HA and scalability
🧩 OpenEBS
⚡ ZFS LocalPV
- Type: Node-local storage
- Pros:
- Cons:
- Best for: ultra-fast RWO workloads, both on-prem and in-cloud NVMe-backed nodes
🚀 Mayastor (SPDK + NVMe-oF)
OpenEBS is gradually deprecating cStor in favor of Mayastor, its next-gen replicated engine.
- Type: Distributed storage built on SPDK (user-space) and NVMe-over-Fabrics
- Pros:
- Cons:
- Best for: modern replicated setups needing high availability with lower overhead
⚙️ DRBD / LINSTOR (+ OCFS2 for RWX)
- Type: Block-level synchronous replication between nodes
- Pros:
- OCFS2:
- Cons:
- Best for: compact HA clusters, critical databases
⚖️ Summary
💡 Key takeaways
- Need scale-out resilience → Ceph RBD
- Need pure performance (on-prem or cloud) → OpenEBS ZFS LocalPV
- Need modern lightweight HA → OpenEBS Mayastor (SPDK/NVMe-oF)
- Need simple, robust HA → DRBD + OCFS2
🚀 Pro tip: If you’re running Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB, or Redis on Kubernetes in AWS, you likely don’t need EBS or Ceph, use OpenEBS ZFS LocalPV instead and get near-bare-metal NVMe performance.
🤔 What’s your go-to storage setup for RWO PVCs in production? #Kubernetes #Storage #Ceph #OpenEBS #ZFS #Mayastor #SPDK #DRBD #NVMe #AWS #EBS #DevOps #SRE
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