_Editor’s note: today’s guest post is by Shailesh Mittal, Software Architect and Ashok Rajagopalan, Sr Director Product at Datera Inc, talking about Stateful Application provisioning with Kubernetes on Datera Elastic Data Fabric._
Persistent volumes in Kubernetes are foundational as customers move beyond stateless workloads to run stateful applications. While Kubernetes has supported stateful applications such as MySQL, Kafka, Cassandra, and Couchbase for a while, the introduction of Pet Sets has significantly improved this support. In particular, the procedure to sequence the provisioning and startup, the ability to scale and associate durably by [Pet Sets](/docs/user-guide/petset/) has provided the ability to automate to scale the “Pets” (applications that require consistent handling and durable placement).
Datera, elastic block storage for cloud deployments, has [seamlessly integrated with Kubernetes](http://datera.io/blog-library/8/19/datera-simplifies-stateful-containers-on-kubernetes-13) through the [FlexVolume](/docs/user-guide/volumes/#flexvolume) framework. Based on the first principles of containers, Datera allows application resource provisioning to be decoupled from the underlying physical infrastructure. This brings clean contracts (aka, no dependency or direct knowledge of the underlying physical infrastructure), declarative formats, and eventually portability to stateful applications.
While Kubernetes allows for great flexibility to define the underlying application infrastructure through yaml configurations, Datera allows for that configuration to be passed to the storage infrastructure to provide persistence. Through the notion of Datera AppTemplates, in a Kubernetes environment, stateful applications can be automated to scale.
Persistent storage is defined using the Kubernetes [PersistentVolume](/docs/user-guide/persistent-volumes/#persistent-volumes) subsystem. PersistentVolumes are volume plugins and define volumes that live independently of the lifecycle of the pod that is using it. They are implemented as NFS, iSCSI, or by cloud provider specific storage system. Datera has developed a volume plugin for PersistentVolumes that can provision iSCSI block storage on the Datera Data Fabric for Kubernetes pods.
The Datera volume plugin gets invoked by kubelets on minion nodes and relays the calls to the Datera Data Fabric over its REST API. Below is a sample deployment of a PersistentVolume with the Datera plugin:
This manifest defines a PersistentVolume of 100 GB to be provisioned in the Datera Data Fabric, should a pod request the persistent storage.
```
[root@tlx241 /]# kubectl get pv
NAME CAPACITY ACCESSMODES STATUS CLAIM REASON AGE
pv-datera-0 100Gi RWO Available 8s
pv-datera-1 100Gi RWO Available 2s
pv-datera-2 100Gi RWO Available 7s
pv-datera-3 100Gi RWO Available 4s
```
**Configuration**
The Datera PersistenceVolume plugin is installed on all minion nodes. When a pod lands on a minion node with a valid claim bound to the persistent storage provisioned earlier, the Datera plugin forwards the request to create the volume on the Datera Data Fabric. All the options that are specified in the PersistentVolume manifest are sent to the plugin upon the provisioning request.
Once a volume is provisioned in the Datera Data Fabric, volumes are presented as an iSCSI block device to the minion node, and kubelet mounts this device for the containers (in the pod) to access it.
Kubernetes PersistentVolumes are used along with a pod using PersistentVolume Claims. Once a claim is defined, it is bound to a PersistentVolume matching the claim’s specification. A typical claim for the PersistentVolume defined above would look like below:
```
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
name: pv-claim-test-petset-0
spec:
accessModes:
- ReadWriteOnce
resources:
requests:
storage: 100Gi
```
When this claim is defined and it is bound to a PersistentVolume, resources can be used with the pod specification:
A pod can use a PersistentVolume Claim like below:
```
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: kube-pv-demo
spec:
containers:
- name: data-pv-demo
image: nginx
volumeMounts:
- name: test-kube-pv1
mountPath: /data
ports:
- containerPort: 80
volumes:
- name: test-kube-pv1
persistentVolumeClaim:
claimName: pv-claim-test-petset-0
```
The result is a pod using a PersistentVolume Claim as a volume. It in-turn sends the request to the Datera volume plugin to provision storage in the Datera Data Fabric.
/dev/sdb on /data type xfs (rw,relatime,attr2,inode64,noquota)
```
**Using Pet Sets**
Typically, pods are treated as stateless units, so if one of them is unhealthy or gets superseded, Kubernetes just disposes it. In contrast, a PetSet is a group of stateful pods that has a stronger notion of identity. The goal of a PetSet is to decouple this dependency by assigning identities to individual instances of an application that are not anchored to the underlying physical infrastructure.
A PetSet requires {0..n-1} Pets. Each Pet has a deterministic name, PetSetName-Ordinal, and a unique identity. Each Pet has at most one pod, and each PetSet has at most one Pet with a given identity. A PetSet ensures that a specified number of “pets” with unique identities are running at any given time. The identity of a Pet is comprised of:
- a stable hostname, available in DNS
- an ordinal index
- stable storage: linked to the ordinal & hostname
A typical PetSet definition using a PersistentVolume Claim looks like below:
Once a PetSet is instantiated, such as test-petset below, upon increasing the number of replicas (i.e. the number of pods started with that PetSet), more pods get instantiated and more PersistentVolume Claims get bound to new pods:
Now the PetSet is running 3 pods after patch application.
When the above PetSet definition is patched to have one more replica, it introduces one more pod in the system. This in turn results in one more volume getting provisioned on the Datera Data Fabric. So volumes get dynamically provisioned and attached to a pod upon the PetSet scaling up.
To support the notion of durability and consistency, if a pod moves from one minion to another, volumes do get attached (mounted) to the new minion node and detached (unmounted) from the old minion to maintain persistent access to the data.
**Conclusion**
This demonstrates Kubernetes with Pet Sets orchestrating stateful and stateless workloads. While the Kubernetes community is working on expanding the FlexVolume framework’s capabilities, we are excited that this solution makes it possible for Kubernetes to be run more widely in the datacenters.
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