For anyone who thinks running a database in a container environment is a neat idea, think again. I am guilty of using containers for temporary test databases, but the thought of running production databases in containers sends shivers down my spine.
Not sure why you're so fearful. Bare metal machines can crash in weird ways and K8s containers can be just as reliable as the underlying host.
That said, I don’t think it’s a sin at all to use it for testing. My default local dev setup is to use a Postgres container. But persistence is very much not required in that situation.
Kubernetes does more than that, and has features like PVCs + Statefulsets are basically intended for, designed for exactly this use case. If you see the HN comments[1], the top comment mentions this, and that the article waves it away for reasons not related to k8s, but to "well, if the underlying storage is slow or not durable, then…" … yeah, then it doesn't matter if you're running k8s in the middle of it or not.
There are (good) attempts at shoving it in, but the general advice I would give is that if you care about your data you should give it every possible chance for to not be corrupted or disrupted; and that means keeping the number of abstractions and indirections low.
I probably could have those things on their own instance but then I’d need to have to go through the hassle of networking, failover/recreation, deployments, etc and for the vast majority of cases that’s 100% more effort than deploy a stateful-set.
Now! Altinity runs Altinity.Cloud now in AWS. Feel free to drop by.
There are also services in other clouds. Yandex runs one in their cloud and there are at least 3 in China. ClickHouse has a big and active community of providers.
Disclaimer: I work for Altinity.
Fantastic to hear! This is so exciting.
There is significant impedance mismatch between this and the other K8s assumption that pods are ephemeral and can be relocated or restarted any time.
Inherited a setup using a semi-well-known vendors Patroni/Postgres HA operator implementation on OpenShift and it was extremely fragile to any kind of network latency/downtime (due to its strong tie to the master api) or worker node outage/drainage/maintenance. These events would mean hours of recovery work hacking around the operator.
It was not my decision to place Postgres on OpenShift and I will strongly discourage anyone planning to do this for production (or even testing). Please do not do it if you value your time and sanity. Spin up a replica set on VMs using one of the already production ready and battlehardened solutions or if in cloud use a managed Postgresql service.