Mathis Kretz - Adventures in stateful applications on Kubernetes

Most people would agree that Kubernetes really shines when running applications consisting of stateless microservices. However, the world is not all rainbows and butterflies and sometimes holding state in your application is inevitable. On one hand, you might be running a database of sorts which has to deal with state by definition. On the other hand, you might be performing some complex calculation based on events over time where externalizing the state poses a performance problem or where the code stems from an era before the cloud and would be difficult to change. In this session, I will review the existing Kubernetes-native concepts and techniques for dealing with stateful workload. Subsequently, I will present tools and frameworks from the cloud-native ecosystem, which offer some additional possibilities. Finally, I will demo a prototype for a new open-source solution addressing challenges which I think are not addressed so far, and conclude by interactively gathering the audience's feedback and opinions on the potential value of such a solution.