Challenges Of Stateful Workloads In Kubernetes: Meet The Data on Kubernetes Community (DoKC)

Kubernetes is well known for its ability to run stateless workloads. Today it is increasingly being used to run databases and other stateful workloads. The Data on Kubernetes Community (DoKC) was founded in June 2020 to bring people together to tackle the challenges of working with data on Kubernetes. To learn more about the community, we invited three guests from DoKC to our Let’s Talk show.
“DoKC was started to bring people together to talk about the challenges of running stateful workloads on Kubernetes, how do we do this right, and what do we want the future to look like,” says Melissa Logan, Director of DoKC.
Bringing the perspective of database communities, Gabriele Bartolini, VP of Cloud Native at EDB, talks about what it’s like to bring their experience from the Postgres community into a much larger community like the Kubernetes one. “Conceptually people think that Kubernetes is just for stateless workloads,” says Bartolini, “but we want to bring Postgres into the Kubernetes space. We found ourselves with the same challenges that the Data on Kubernetes Community is actually trying to solve.”
The Data On Kubernetes 2021 Report
The Data on Kubernetes 2021 report revealed that as organizations seek to expand their data on Kubernetes footprint, they find a lack of integration and interoperability with existing tools and stacks; skilled staff; quality of Kubernetes operators; and trusted vendors. “And I wouldn't even say today that Kubernetes is really ready for stateful workloads. And I think that's really what the goal of the DoK Community is, is to try to make that a reality…the truth of the matter is that everybody's going about it a different way, and there's many different ways to solve this problem,” quips Umair Mufti, Director of product management at Portworx by Pure Storage.
The report highlights how widespread the use of stateful workloads on Kubernetes is while underlining key areas for improvement. “What we found is more people are using stateful workloads than we had potentially thought, given the challenges that we had heard anecdotally from different end users we had spoken to. And the survey found that 90% think Kubernetes is ready for stateful workloads, and 70% are currently running stateful workloads, but that does not come without challenges,” adds Logan.
Logan continues, “The number one challenge they have is interoperability with their stack. And then when we talk about operators, additional challenges come up, and that includes interoperability with other operators.”
But what do people really want in the future? A majority believe standards will improve data management and that data should become declarative. “Some of what the group here talked about is the idea of standards. So we asked about data standards, would that help? Majority said yes. A majority also agreed that making data more declarative, things like this would help make standardization on Kubernetes easier. Some of the key benefits that people see from standardizing on Kubernetes are massive gains in productivity,” avers Logan.
Check out the interview above to gain further insight into the Data on Kubernetes 2021 report and more.