hands-on lab

Deploy a Stateful Application in a Kubernetes Cluster

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Up to 2h 45m

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Lab description

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

May 6th, 2024 - Addressed an issue preventing the lab from setting up

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

Environment before

Environment after

About the author

Logan Rakai, opens in a new tab

Lead Content Developer - Labs

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Learning paths

Logan has been involved in software development and research since 2007 and has been in the cloud since 2012. He is an AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert, MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS), Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), and Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA). He earned his Ph.D. studying design automation and enjoys all things tech.

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Covered topics

Lab steps

Connecting to the Kubernetes Cluster

Inspecting the Kubernetes Cluster

Deploying a Stateful Application in the Kubernetes Cluster

Working with the Stateful Application