Stateful Applications in Containers!? Kubernetes 1.3 Says “Yes!”
Editor's note: today’s guest post is from Mark Balch, VP of Products at Diamanti, who’ll share more about the contributions they’ve made to Kubernetes.
Congratulations to the Kubernetes community on another
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Apps Need More Than Cattle Beyond stateless containers like web servers (so-called “cattle” because they are interchangeable), users are increasingly deploying stateful workloads with containers to benefit from “build once, run anywhere” and to improve bare metal efficiency/utilization. These “pets” (so-called because each requires special handling) bring new requirements including longer life cycle, configuration dependencies, stateful failover, and performance sensitivity. Container orchestration must address these needs to successfully deploy and scale apps. Enter Pet Set, a new object in Kubernetes 1.3 for improved stateful application support. Pet Set sequences through the startup phase of each database replica (for example), ensuring orderly master/slave configuration. Pet Set also simplifies service discovery by leveraging ubiquitous DNS SRV records, a well-recognized and long-understood mechanism. Diamanti’s
A Federalist Users who are planning for application availability must contend with issues of failover and scale across geography. Cross-cluster federated services allows containerized apps to easily deploy across multiple clusters. Federated services tackles challenges such as managing multiple container clusters and coordinating service deployment and discovery across federated clusters. Like a strictly centralized model, federation provides a common app deployment interface. With each cluster retaining autonomy, however, federation adds flexibility to manage clusters locally during network outages and other events. Cross-cluster federated services also applies consistent service naming and adoption across container clusters, simplifying DNS resolution. It’s easy to imagine powerful multi-cluster use cases with cross-cluster federated services in future releases. An example is scheduling containers based on governance, security, and performance requirements. Diamanti’s scheduler extension was developed with this concept in mind. Our
Get Involved With interest growing in stateful apps, work has already started to further enhance Kubernetes storage. The Storage Special Interest Group is discussing proposals to support local storage resources. Diamanti is looking forward to extend FlexVolume to include richer APIs that enable local storage and storage services including data protection, replication, and reduction. We’re also working on proposals for improved app placement, migration, and failover across container clusters through Kubernetes cross-cluster federated services. Join the conversation and contribute! Here are some places to get started: