Chapter 7: Managing Storage and Stateful Applications

In the previous chapters, we learned how to provision and prepare our Kubernetes clusters for production workloads. It is part of the critical production readiness requirement to configure and fine-tune day zero tasks, including networking, security, monitoring, logging, observability, and scaling, before we bring our applications and data to Kubernetes. Kubernetes was originally designed for mainly stateless applications in order to keep containers portable. Therefore, data management and running stateful applications are still among the top challenges in the cloud native space. There are a number of ways and a variety of solutions to address storage needs. New solutions emerge in the Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystem every day; therefore, we will start with popular in-production solutions and also learn the approach and criteria to look for when evaluating future solutions.

In this chapter, we will learn the technical challenges...