Learn OpenShift

Persistent versus ephemeral storage

By default, OpenShift/Kubernetes containers don't store data persistently. We can start an application and OpenShift will start a new container from an immutable Docker image. It uses an ephemeral storage, which means that data is available until the container is deleted or rebuilt. If our application (and all related containers) has been rebuilt, all data will be lost. Still, this approach is fine for any stateless application. For example, it will work for a simple website that doesn't act as a portal and only provides information embedded into HTML/CSS. Another example would be a database used for development—usually, no one cares if data is lost.

Let's consider another example. Imagine that we need ...