Kubernetes: Up and Running, 3rd Edition

Chapter 5. Pods

In earlier chapters, we discussed how you might go about containerizing your application, but in real-world deployments of containerized applications, you will often want to colocate multiple applications into a single atomic unit, scheduled onto a single machine.

A canonical example of such a deployment is illustrated in Figure 5-1, which consists of a container serving web requests and a container synchronizing the filesystem with a remote Git repository.

Figure 5-1. An example Pod with two containers and a shared filesystem

At first, it might seem tempting to wrap both the web server and the Git synchronizer into a single container. After closer inspection, however, the reasons for the separation become clear. First, the two containers have significantly different requirements in terms of resource usage. Take, for example, memory: because the web server is serving user requests, we want to ensure that it is always available and responsive. On the other hand, the Git synchronizer isn’t really user-facing and has a “best effort” quality of service.

Suppose that our Git synchronizer has a memory leak. We need to ensure that the Git synchronizer cannot use up memory that we want to use for our web server, since this can affect performance or even crash the server.

This sort of resource isolation is exactly the sort of thing that containers are designed to accomplish. ...