StatefulSets
StatefulSet is the workload API object used to manage stateful applications.
Note: StatefulSets are stable (GA) in 1.9.
Manages the deployment and scaling of a set of Pods, and provides guarantees about the ordering and uniqueness of these Pods.
Like a Deployment, a StatefulSet manages Pods that are based on an identical container spec. Unlike a Deployment, a StatefulSet maintains a sticky identity for each of their Pods. These pods are created from the same spec, but are not interchangeable: each has a persistent identifier that it maintains across any rescheduling.
A StatefulSet operates under the same pattern as any other Controller. You define your desired state in a StatefulSet object, and the StatefulSet controller makes any necessary updates to get there from the current state.
- Using StatefulSets
- Limitations
- Components
- Pod Selector
- Pod Identity
- Deployment and Scaling Guarantees
- Update Strategies
Using StatefulSets
StatefulSets are valuable for applications that require one or more of the following.
- Stable, unique network identifiers.
- Stable, persistent storage.
- Ordered, graceful deployment and scaling.
- Ordered, graceful deletion and termination.
- Ordered, automated rolling updates.
In the above, stable is synonymous with persistence across Pod (re)scheduling. If an application doesn’t require any stable identifiers or ordered deployment, deletion, or scaling, you should deploy your application with a controller that provides a set of stateless replicas. Controllers such as Deployment or ReplicaSet may be better suited to your stateless needs.
Limitations
- StatefulSet was a beta resource prior to 1.9 and not available in any Kubernetes release prior to 1.5.
- As with all alpha/beta resources, you can disable StatefulSet through the
--runtime-config
option passed to the apiserver. - The storage for a given Pod must either be provisioned by a PersistentVolume Provisioner based on the requested
storage class
, or pre-provisioned by an admin. - Deleting and/or scaling a StatefulSet down will not delete the volumes associated with the StatefulSet. This is done to ensure data safety, which is generally more valuable than an automatic purge of all related StatefulSet resources.
- StatefulSets currently require a Headless Service to be responsible for the network identity of the Pods. You are responsible for creating this Service.
Components
The example below demonstrates the components of a StatefulSet.
- A Headless Service, named nginx, is used to control the network domain.
- The StatefulSet, named web, has a Spec that indicates that 3 replicas of the nginx container will be launched in unique Pods.
- The volumeClaimTemplates will provide stable storage using PersistentVolumes provisioned by a PersistentVolume Provisioner.
apiVersion: v1 kind: Service metadata: name: nginx labels: app: nginx spec: ports: - port: 80 name: web clusterIP: None selector: app: nginx --- apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: StatefulSet metadata: name: web spec: selector: matchLabels: app: nginx # has to match .spec.template.metadata.labels serviceName: "nginx" replicas: 3 # by default is 1 template: metadata: labels: app: nginx # has to match .spec.selector.matchLabels spec: terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 10 containers: - name: nginx image: k8s.gcr.io/nginx-slim:0.8 ports: - containerPort: 80 name: web volumeMounts: - name: www mountPath: /usr/share/nginx/html volumeClaimTemplates: - metadata: name: www spec: accessModes: [ "ReadWriteOnce" ] storageClassName: my-storage-class resources: requests: storage: 1Gi
Pod Selector
You must set the spec.selector
field of a StatefulSet to match the labels of its .spec.template.metadata.labels
. Prior to Kubernetes 1.8, the spec.selector
field was defaulted when omitted. In 1.8 and later versions, failing to specify a matching Pod Selector will result in a validation error during StatefulSet creation.
Pod Identity
StatefulSet Pods have a unique identity that is comprised of an ordinal, a stable network identity, and stable storage. The identity sticks to the Pod, regardless of which node it’s (re)scheduled on.
Ordinal Index
For a StatefulSet with N replicas, each Pod in the StatefulSet will be assigned an integer ordinal, in the range [0,N), that is unique over the Set.
Stable Network ID
Each Pod in a StatefulSet derives its hostname from the name of the StatefulSet and the ordinal of the Pod. The pattern for the constructed hostname is $(statefulset name)-$(ordinal)
. The example above will create three Pods named web-0,web-1,web-2
. A StatefulSet can use a Headless Service to control the domain of its Pods. The domain managed by this Service takes the form: $(service name).$(namespace).svc.cluster.local
, where “cluster.local” is the cluster domain. As each Pod is created, it gets a matching DNS subdomain, taking the form: $(podname).$(governing service domain)
, where the governing service is defined by the serviceName
field on the StatefulSet.
Here are some examples of choices for Cluster Domain, Service name, StatefulSet name, and how that affects the DNS names for the StatefulSet’s Pods.
Note that Cluster Domain will be set to cluster.local
unless otherwise configured.
Stable Storage
Kubernetes creates one PersistentVolume for each VolumeClaimTemplate. In the nginx example above, each Pod will receive a single PersistentVolume with a StorageClass of my-storage-class
and 1 Gib of provisioned storage. If no StorageClass is specified, then the default StorageClass will be used. When a Pod is (re)scheduled onto a node, its volumeMounts
mount the PersistentVolumes associated with its PersistentVolume Claims. Note that, the PersistentVolumes associated with the Pods’ PersistentVolume Claims are not deleted when the Pods, or StatefulSet are deleted. This must be done manually.
Pod Name Label
When the StatefulSet controller creates a Pod, it adds a label, statefulset.kubernetes.io/pod-name
, that is set to the name of the Pod. This label allows you to attach a Service to a specific Pod in the StatefulSet.
Deployment and Scaling Guarantees
- For a StatefulSet with N replicas, when Pods are being deployed, they are created sequentially, in order from {0..N-1}.
- When Pods are being deleted, they are terminated in reverse order, from {N-1..0}.
- Before a scaling operation is applied to a Pod, all of its predecessors must be Running and Ready.
- Before a Pod is terminated, all of its successors must be completely shutdown.
The StatefulSet should not specify a pod.Spec.TerminationGracePeriodSeconds
of 0. This practice is unsafe and strongly discouraged. For further explanation, please refer to force deleting StatefulSet Pods.
When the nginx example above is created, three Pods will be deployed in the order web-0, web-1, web-2. web-1 will not be deployed before web-0 is Running and Ready, and web-2 will not be deployed until web-1 is Running and Ready. If web-0 should fail, after web-1 is Running and Ready, but before web-2 is launched, web-2 will not be launched until web-0 is successfully relaunched and becomes Running and Ready.
If a user were to scale the deployed example by patching the StatefulSet such that replicas=1
, web-2 would be terminated first. web-1 would not be terminated until web-2 is fully shutdown and deleted. If web-0 were to fail after web-2 has been terminated and is completely shutdown, but prior to web-1’s termination, web-1 would not be terminated until web-0 is Running and Ready.
Pod Management Policies
In Kubernetes 1.7 and later, StatefulSet allows you to relax its ordering guarantees while preserving its uniqueness and identity guarantees via its .spec.podManagementPolicy
field.
OrderedReady Pod Management
OrderedReady
pod management is the default for StatefulSets. It implements the behavior described above.
Parallel Pod Management
Parallel
pod management tells the StatefulSet controller to launch or terminate all Pods in parallel, and to not wait for Pods to become Running and Ready or completely terminated prior to launching or terminating another Pod.
Update Strategies
In Kubernetes 1.7 and later, StatefulSet’s .spec.updateStrategy
field allows you to configure and disable automated rolling updates for containers, labels, resource request/limits, and annotations for the Pods in a StatefulSet.
On Delete
The OnDelete
update strategy implements the legacy (1.6 and prior) behavior. It is the default strategy when spec.updateStrategy
is left unspecified. When a StatefulSet’s .spec.updateStrategy.type
is set to OnDelete
, the StatefulSet controller will not automatically update the Pods in a StatefulSet. Users must manually delete Pods to cause the controller to create new Pods that reflect modifications made to a StatefulSet’s .spec.template
.
Rolling Updates
The RollingUpdate
update strategy implements automated, rolling update for the Pods in a StatefulSet. When a StatefulSet’s .spec.updateStrategy.type
is set to RollingUpdate
, the StatefulSet controller will delete and recreate each Pod in the StatefulSet. It will proceed in the same order as Pod termination (from the largest ordinal to the smallest), updating each Pod one at a time. It will wait until an updated Pod is Running and Ready prior to updating its predecessor.
Partitions
The RollingUpdate
update strategy can be partitioned, by specifying a .spec.updateStrategy.rollingUpdate.partition
. If a partition is specified, all Pods with an ordinal that is greater than or equal to the partition will be updated when the StatefulSet’s .spec.template
is updated. All Pods with an ordinal that is less than the partition will not be updated, and, even if they are deleted, they will be recreated at the previous version. If a StatefulSet’s .spec.updateStrategy.rollingUpdate.partition
is greater than its .spec.replicas
, updates to its .spec.template
will not be propagated to its Pods. In most cases you will not need to use a partition, but they are useful if you want to stage an update, roll out a canary, or perform a phased roll out
Daemon Sets
- What is a DaemonSet?
- Writing a DaemonSet Spec
- How Daemon Pods are Scheduled
- Communicating with Daemon Pods
- Updating a DaemonSet
- Alternatives to DaemonSet
What is a DaemonSet?
A DaemonSet ensures that all (or some) Nodes run a copy of a Pod. As nodes are added to the cluster, Pods are added to them. As nodes are removed from the cluster, those Pods are garbage collected. Deleting a DaemonSet will clean up the Pods it created.
Some typical uses of a DaemonSet are:
- running a cluster storage daemon, such as
glusterd
,ceph
, on each node. - running a logs collection daemon on every node, such as
fluentd
orlogstash
. - running a node monitoring daemon on every node, such as Prometheus Node Exporter,
collectd
, Datadog agent, New Relic agent, or Gangliagmond
.
In a simple case, one DaemonSet, covering all nodes, would be used for each type of daemon. A more complex setup might use multiple DaemonSets for a single type of daemon, but with different flags and/or different memory and cpu requests for different hardware types.
Writing a DaemonSet Spec
Create a DaemonSet
You can describe a DaemonSet in a YAML file. For example, the daemonset.yaml
file below describes a DaemonSet that runs the fluentd-elasticsearch Docker image:
apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: DaemonSet metadata: name: fluentd-elasticsearch namespace: kube-system labels: k8s-app: fluentd-logging spec: selector: matchLabels: name: fluentd-elasticsearch template: metadata: labels: name: fluentd-elasticsearch spec: tolerations: - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/master effect: NoSchedule containers: - name: fluentd-elasticsearch image: gcr.io/google-containers/fluentd-elasticsearch:1.20 resources: limits: memory: 200Mi requests: cpu: 100m memory: 200Mi volumeMounts: - name: varlog mountPath: /var/log - name: varlibdockercontainers mountPath: /var/lib/docker/containers readOnly: true terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30 volumes: - name: varlog hostPath: path: /var/log - name: varlibdockercontainers hostPath: path: /var/lib/docker/containers