DoKC Report Sees Stateful App Surge on Kubernetes

A report published by the Data on Kubernetes Community (DoKC) finds 70% of respondents report they are now running stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters with another 20% saying they expect to see these types of workloads deployed on the platform.

The survey was conducted by the market research firm Clearpath Strategies and finds that 46% of respondents are now running more than half their stateful workloads on Kubernetes clusters.

DoKC director Melissa Logan says this shift shows that Kubernetes has come of age for running both stateful and stateless applications. Originally, most of the workloads deployed on Kubernetes clusters were stateless, in that they relied on external systems to store data. Increasingly, however, 50% of organizations are now deploying databases directly on Kubernetes clusters to more efficiently access data stored on the cluster.

Kubernetes provides access to storage using persistent volumes (PV). This makes it possible to access data far beyond the lifespan of any given pod. Kubernetes volumes allow users to mount storage units to expand how much data they can share between nodes. Regular volumes will still be deleted if and when the pod hosting that particular volume is shut down. The permanent volume, however, is hosted on its own pod to ensure data remains accessible.

Upon creation, the PV is bound to the pod that requested the PVC. IT teams can then manage storage in Kubernetes via a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) function to request storage; a PersistentVolume (PV) to manage storage life cycle and a StorageClass function that defines different classes of storage services.

The primary reasons IT teams are deploying stateful applications in Kubernetes clusters is to ensure consistency (45%), a desire to standardize on Kubernetes (40%), simplify management (39%) and enable developers to self-manage the IT environment (39%).

The biggest challenge IT teams are encountering when deploying those workloads is a lack of integration with existing tools, (35%), lack of interoperability (32%), vendor platforms that only address niche requirements (30%) and a lack of skills (29%).

Overall, the DoKC survey finds half of the respondents are running 50% or more of their production workloads on Kubernetes, with 69% reporting they are very satisfied and 68% reporting they are likely to increase the overall footprint of Kubernetes in their organization. Half (50%) also report their organization is more productive after adopting Kubernetes. A full 86% have only adopted Kubernetes in the past two years, the report notes.

The debate over stateful versus stateless applications is as much technical as it is philosophical. However, there are more IT environments that are deploying Kubernetes clusters in greenfield environments at the edge where there are no local legacy storage platforms to access. In other cases, IT teams simply want to converge the management of compute and storage rather than having to hire a separate administrator to manage an external storage system. The cost of labor is, after all, still the single biggest cost of IT.

There may soon come a day when IT professionals look back and wonder what all the stateful applications on Kubernetes fuss was all about.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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