I don't understand why you say "Having containers with local volumes is counter productive." I would agree it's probably not a good architecture if you're running a huge single-node Oracle database, but it's an excellent way to run data stores like Cassandra, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis, etcd, Zookeeper, and so on. Many people are already doing this, and as one large-scale real-world example, all of Google's storage systems run in containers. The first containerized applications (both at Google and in the "real world") were indeed stateless, but there's nothing fundamental about containers that makes them fundamentally ill-suited for stateful applications.