Managing Cloud Native Data on Kubernetes

Chapter 2. Managing Data Storage on Kubernetes

There is no such thing as a stateless architecture. All applications store state somewhere.

Alex Chircop, CEO, StorageOS

In the previous chapter, we painted a picture of a possible near future with powerful, stateful, data-intensive applications running on Kubernetes. To get there, we’re going to need data infrastructure for persistence, streaming, and analytics. To build out this infrastructure, we’ll need to leverage the primitives that Kubernetes provides to help manage the three commodities of cloud computing: compute, network, and storage. In the next several chapters, we’ll begin to look at these primitives, starting with storage, in order to see how they can be combined to create the data infrastructure we need.

To echo the point raised by Alex Chircop, all applications must store their state somewhere, which is why we’ll focus in this chapter on the basic abstractions Kubernetes provides for interacting with storage. We’ll also look at the emerging innovations being offered by storage vendors and open source projects creating storage infrastructure for Kubernetes that itself embodies cloud native principles.

Let’s start our exploration with a look at managing persistence in containerized applications in general and use that as a jumping-off point for our investigation into data storage on Kubernetes.

Docker, Containers, and State

The problem of managing state in distributed, cloud native applications is not unique to Kubernetes. ...