Stateful Containers with Kubernetes/Docker is it possible?

Question

I apologize if this is an ignorant question but I am building out a Kubernetes cluster and I really like the idea of abstracting my computing infrastructure from a single cloud provider and steering away from a VM platform but what about statefulness? I want to be able to setup a mysql server for example and keep that data for life, I want Kubernetes to load balance a mysql container with a data drive, we speak about containers and we think life and death within seconds but what about when we want to keep data around and build a kick ass data center without VM's is there a concept of of being stateful in this paradigm?

Answer 1

Kubernetes provides StatefulSets for Deploying stateful containers like databases. Follow the below link to understand how to deploy mysql database In highly available mode https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/run-replicated-stateful-application/

Answer 2

Not ignorant at all, in fact, stateful apps (often DBs) require special consideration in Kubernetes.

StatefulSets are one of the primary Kubernetes objects that exist to help support the use of stateful apps.

This is a decent guide to solving some of the challenges. It's written by Google for Kubernetes Engine but the concepts apply to Kubernetes broadly. There is also a GKE-specific overview .