Stateful applications are applications with memory of the past. Kubernetes has achieved wide adoption for deploying stateless applications. Kubernetes also provides a rich set of features for running stateful applications. Adoption of Kubernetes for stateful applications is growing and so is the list of stateful workloads that are supported by Kubernetes. In this lab, you will deploy a stateful application in a Kubernetes cluster to understand how Kubernetes supports stateful applications.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Describe methods for deploying Kubernetes clusters in the cloud
• Explain how Kubernetes can deploy stateful applications
• Determine if it is a good idea to move a stateful application into Kubernetes
• Use Kubernetes to automatically provision persistent cloud storage volumes
• Expose Kubernetes applications via cloud load balancers
• Monitor and manage Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes Dashboard

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

• Basic Kubernetes concepts such as pods, services, and deployments
• AWS EBS volumes
• Working on the command line in Linux 

Updates

June 13th, 2023 - Updated Kubernetes version

September 6th, 2022 - Updated to run Kubernetes 1.24

July 6th, 2022 - Pinned the MySQL image version for the mysql-init initContainer to resolve an issue with the hostname command not being found

April 28th, 2022 - Updated to run Kubernetes 1.21

January 3rd, 2022 - Improved the explanation of StatefulSets

May 2nd, 2021 - Updated to run Kubernetes 1.20, 80% faster startup time, and use a web terminal

December 16th, 2020 - Updated to Kubernetes 1.19, added EC2 instance connect support, added customized validation check

December 8th, 2020 - Updated instructions to address an issue preventing mysql commands from running

August 28th, 2020 - Updated the SSH instructions to reflect the new EC2 user interface

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation lab step to check the work you perform in the lab