The Cloud Foundry Approach to Container Storage and Security

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Recently, The New Stack published an article titled “Containers and Storage: Why We Aren’t There Yet” covering a talk from IBM’s James Bottomley at the Linux Foundation’s Vault conference in March. Both the talk and article focused on one of the central problems we’ve been working to address in the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s Diego Persistence project team, so we thought it would be a good idea to highlight the features we’ve added to mitigate it. Cloud Foundry does significantly better than what the article suggests is the current state of the art on the container security front, so we’ll cover that here as well.

As the article puts it:

Right now, a major roadblock to stateful storage of containers is the inability, under current Linux-y architectures, to reconcile the file system user ID (fsuid), used by external storage systems, with the user IDs (uids) created within containers. They can not be reconciled in any way that can be both safe and maintainable without loss of coherence of either the system or the system administrator.

Read more at The New Stack