Container storage

Containers are designed to be ephemeral and stateless. Ephemeral means they’re designed to be short-lived, and if they fail you replace them with new ones instead of fixing them. Stateless means they were never designed to store data. In fact, if a container fails, all data inside it is lost.

With this in mind, containers should store data in external systems. It’s a very simple model where application code runs in containers and application data is stored outside of them. A simple cloud example running on AWS might have business application code running inside containers that store the data they generate in AWS elastic block store (EBS) volumes. This way, if any of the application containers fail, the data still exists in the EBS volumes. A similar on-premises example might have application code running inside containers and the data they generate in volumes on a shared NetApp storage system. Other clouds and storage systems exist.

This model decouples...