Managing Cloud Native Data on Kubernetes

Chapter 6. Integrating Data Infrastructure in a Kubernetes Stack

In this book, we are illuminating a future of modern, cloud native applications that run on Kubernetes. Up until this point, we’ve noted that historically, data has been one of the hardest parts of making this a reality. In previous chapters, we’ve introduced the primitives Kubernetes provides for managing compute, network, and storage (Chapter 2) resources, and considered how databases (Chapter 3) can be deployed on Kubernetes using these resources. We’ve also examined the automation of infrastructure using controllers and the operator pattern (Chapter 4).

Now let’s expand our focus to consider how data infrastructure fits into your overall application architecture in Kubernetes. In this chapter, we’ll explore how to assemble the building blocks discussed in previous chapters into integrated data infrastructure stacks that are easy to deploy and tailor to the unique needs of each application. These stacks represent a step toward the vision of the virtual datacenter we introduced in Chapter 1. To learn the considerations involved in building and using these larger assemblies, let’s take an in-depth look at K8ssandra. This open source project provides an integrated data stack based on Apache Cassandra, a database we first discussed in “Running Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes”.

K8ssandra: Production-Ready Cassandra on Kubernetes

To set the context, let’s consider some of the practical challenges ...