Keynote: Debunking the Myth: Kubernetes Storage is Hard - Saad Ali, Senior Software Engineer, Google

Keynote: Debunking the Myth: Kubernetes Storage is Hard - Saad Ali, Senior Software Engineer, Google

We often hear “Storage on Kubernetes is hard” or “Don’t deploy stateful applications on Kubernetes!” Is there any truth to these statements? In this talk I separate fact from fiction.

Storage on Kubernetes can mean a lot of things. First I will start by separating three layers: 1) consuming block and file storage from a pod running in Kubernetes, 2) deploying a stateful app (like a database) on Kubernetes using storage and workload primitives, and 3) deploying a software defined storage system on top of Kubernetes to provide block or file storage. Each of these areas has a different set of challenges that are often conflated to make storage on Kubernetes appear much harder than it is.

After separating these layers, I will help you understand what the challenges are with each of them, and how you work around them to effectively deploy stateful applications on Kubernetes.

[johtib]

I think this misses the point of the central critique against storage on K8s: K8s answer to storage is mainly "use some existing storage on some other cluster". What's lacking is a solution for implementing such storage clusters using K8s (Rook/Ceph is a step in that direction). Google, Amazon, etc have solved this problem on top of their own clusters but K8s doesn't offer very much here. Perhaps K8s don't want to act in this space, which is fine, but that means that it's still a problem in need of solution.

[EldarMusayev]

First, you determine the req's of your system, THEN you consider options.

[justdigitalfilm]

This is just a rolling session of stating the obvious punctuated by explaining that you need to understand things about what you're doing. I sincerely think that this guy wouldn't know what a piece of storage was if it came up and bit him on the arse. Absolute waste of time.