Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Authors: Leila Vayghan

2023-04-19

This talk is a story of how Shopify runs a highly available and scalable stateful application on Kubernetes which is accessed securely over the internet. The application discussed is Elasticsearch which stores petabytes of data over the globe. Search is a fundamental component of an ecommerce platform and high availability is an important requirement for it. While Kubernetes has proven to be the perfect platform for deploying stateless applications, running stateful applications on this platform in a highly available and scalable manner can be complicated. This talk will discuss these challenges and will share the steps towards solving them. For example, Leila will explain the obstacles of implementing storage autoscaling and how using the existing Kubernetes features allowed seamless expansion of persistent disks that store critical search data. She will also explain how her team implemented a feature that allowed shrinking persistent disks without any data loss and saved costs by releasing unused storage. Leila will also explain how Envoy is used to allow clients to connect to Elasticsearch through Kubernetes' ingress. This talk will give insight into the challenges and rewards of running highly available and scalable stateful applications on Kubernetes.

Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022

Authors: Casey West

2022-10-28

The presentation discusses how to run a high-performance, reliable, and disaster-proof Minecraft server on Kubernetes, which can be applied to other stateful applications. The speaker highlights the challenges of managing commercial off-the-shelf software and the benefits of using Kubernetes to increase reliability.

• Minecraft runs in a multi-client, single-server architecture with state and configuration stored on disk.
• Kubernetes can be leveraged to manage high-performance storage, on-disk configuration, custom Pod initializations, regular data backup, and custom service endpoints.
• The speaker emphasizes the importance of using a fast disk and solid-state disks for better performance.
• The access mode should be set to read-write one's pod to avoid issues with disk-based state and multiple instances of the application.
• The speaker also mentions the use of a secret password to connect to the Archon protocol for remote management of the application.
• Kubernetes provides flexibility to increase the reliability of commercial off-the-shelf software not initially meant for a container runtime.

Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022

Authors: Diane Patton, Scott Surovich, Lisa-Marie Namphy, Scott Miller, Gunna Marripudi

2022-10-27

Worried about brining stateful applications onto your Kubernetes clusters? Learn from the Kubernetes experts at DreamWorks, HSBC and NetApp how you can build and operate at scale. In this session, panel members from DreamWorks, HSBC and NetApp will share their experiences from running data rich stateful applications on Kubernetes for years. The panel discussion will cover the following topics and others as related to data management and protection in Kubernetes. (1) Addressing challenges in managing ‘state’ in stateful application. (2) Use of different tools and capabilities Kubernetes ecosystem has delivered. (3) Best practices to optimize storage resource utilization. (4) Future needs of their expanding Kubernetes environments in hybrid-cloud/multi-cloud.