Kubernetes: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15. Integrating Storage Solutions and Kubernetes

In many cases, decoupling state from applications and building your microservices to be as stateless as possible results in maximally reliable, manageable systems.

However, nearly every system that has any complexity has state in the system somewhere, from the records in a database to the index shards that serve results for a web search engine. At some point, you have to have data stored somewhere.

Integrating this data with containers and container orchestration solutions is often the most complicated aspect of building a distributed system. This complexity largely stems from the fact that the move to containerized architectures is also a move toward decoupled, immutable, and declarative application development. These patterns are relatively easy to apply to stateless web applications, but even “cloud-native” storage solutions like Cassandra or MongoDB involve some sort of manual or imperative steps to set up a reliable, replicated solution.

As an example of this, consider setting up a ReplicaSet in MongoDB, which involves deploying the Mongo daemon and then running an imperative command to identify the leader, as well as the participants in the Mongo cluster. Of course, these steps can be scripted, but in a containerized world it is difficult to see how to integrate such commands into a deployment. Likewise, even getting DNS-resolvable names for individual containers in a replicated set of containers is challenging.