I’ve been thinking of moving my Kubernetes lab into the cloud, but with cloud resource usage being scrutinized by the IT department, running them 24x7 the way I’m used to is a no-go. I need a setup that meets the following requirements: Simple to create and tear down Applications must be pre-deployed when the cluster is up, as close to “just the way I left it there last night” as possible cost $0 when the setup has been switched off I eventually settled on the idea of an ephemeral Kubernetes lab environment using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices, which I will cover in this post.

Intro So in my last post I showed how you could create databases on Kubernetes. There are many reasons to do this. Equally, there are reasons not to do this, but for highly distributed deployments it does make sense. This post is going to focus on the storage components of running a database on Kubernetes. Why do I need persistent storage Persistent storage as the name implies allows you to store your data between container restarts.

Intro Recently, I’ve been working with a customer who wants to provide databases on their Kubernetes cluster. Ever since Microsoft’s SQL Server was released on Linux some years ago, I’ve been fascinated with it. I decided to give it a go recently on Kubernetes, and get it all working. This is part one, where I deploy SQL server without persistent storage. In part two, I will discuss using persistent storage.

Intro I have a side hobby where I try to create minimal container images. There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary one is because I’m a complete geek. Other reasons include: It’s a neatness thing There’s an engineering imperative in me to be minimalist I don’t like waste The process of creation helps me understand the technology a little better Smaller images are great for testing at scale Why The why I do this is mainly because it’s a hobby, but in this case, I started the ultra minimal container image build because someone I work with wanted to build a container for testing Istio latency at scale.