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Container Service for Kubernetes:Use a StatefulSet to create a stateful application

Last Updated:Dec 19, 2023

Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) allows you to deploy stateful applications by using StatefulSets in the ACK console. This topic describes how to create a stateful NGINX application and the features of StatefulSets.

Prerequisites

Before you create a StatefulSet from an image, make sure that the following steps are completed:

Background information

StatefulSets provide the following features:

Feature

Description

Pod consistency

Pod consistency ensures that pods are started and terminated in the specified order and ensures network consistency. Pod consistency is determined by pod configurations, regardless of the node to which a pod is scheduled.

Stable and persistent storage

VolumeClaimTemplate allows you to mount a persistent volume (PV) to each pod. The mounted PVs are not deleted after you delete replicated pods or scale in the number of replicated pods.

Stable network identifiers

Each pod in a StatefulSet derives its hostname from the name of the StatefulSet and the ordinal of the pod. The pattern of the hostname is StatefulSet name-pod ordinal.

Stable orders

For a StatefulSet with N replicated pods, each pod is assigned an integer ordinal from 0 to N-1. The ordinals assigned to pods within the StatefulSet are unique.

Procedure

  1. Log on to the ACK console.

  2. In the left-side navigation pane of the ACK console, click Clusters.

  3. On the Clusters page, find the cluster that you want to manage and click the name of the cluster or click Details in the Actions column. The details page of the cluster appears.

  4. In the left-side navigation pane of the details page, choose Workloads > StatefulSets.

  5. In the upper-right corner of the StatefulSets page, click Create from Image.

  6. On the Basic Information wizard page, configure the basic settings.

    In this example, the Type parameter is set to StatefulSet to deploy a stateful application.

    Parameter

    Description

    Name

    The name of the application.

    Namespace

    The namespace where you want to deploy the application. The default namespace is automatically selected. You can select another namespace.

    Replicas

    The number of pods that you want to provision for the application.

    Type

    The type of the application. You can select Deployment, StatefulSet, Job, CronJob, or DaemonSet.

    Label

    Add a label to the application. The label is used to identify the application.

    Annotations

    Add an annotation to the application.

    Synchronize Timezone

    Specify whether to synchronize the time zone between nodes and containers.

  7. Click Next to proceed to the Container wizard page.

  8. Configure containers.

    Note

    In the upper part of the Container wizard page, click Add Container to add more containers for the application.

    The following table describes the parameters that are used to configure the containers.

    • Basic settings

      Parameter

      Description

      Image Name

      • You can click Select Image. In the dialog box that appears, select an image and click OK. In this example, an NGINX image is selected. On the Search tab, select Docker Images from the drop-down list, enter NGINX in the search box, and then click Search.

        • Images from Container Registry: On the Alibaba Cloud Container Registry tab, you can select an image that is hosted by Container Registry. You must select the region and the Container Registry instance to which the image belongs. For more information about Container Registry, see What is Container Registry?.

          Note

          On the Alibaba Cloud Container Registry tab, you can search for images by name.

        • Docker official images: On the Docker Official Images tab, you can select a Docker image.

        • Favorite images: On the Favorite Images tab, you can select a Docker image that you have added to your favorite list.

        • Search for images: On the Search tab, you can select Alibaba Cloud Image from the drop-down list and specify a region to search for an image in Container Registry. You can also select Docker Images from the drop-down list and search for a Docker image.

      • You can also enter the address of a private registry. The image address must be in the domainname/namespace/imagename:tag format.

      Image Version

      • Click Select Image Version and select an image version. If you do not specify an image version, the latest image version is used.
      • You can select the following image pulling policies:
        • ifNotPresent: If the image that you want to pull is found on your on-premises machine, the image on your on-premises machine is used. Otherwise, Container Service pulls the image from the image registry.
        • Always: Container Service pulls the image from the registry each time the application is deployed or expanded.
        • Never: Container Service uses only images on your on-premise machine.
        Note If you select Image Pull Policy, no image pulling policy is applied.
      • To pull the image without a password, click Set Image Pull Secret to configure a Secret for pulling images. For more information, see Use the aliyun-acr-credential-helper component to pull images without using a secret.

      Resource Limit

      You can specify an upper limit for the CPU, memory, and ephemeral storage space that the container can consume. This prevents the container from occupying an excessive amount of resources.

      Required Resources

      The amount of CPU and memory resources that are reserved for this application. These resources are exclusive to the container. This prevents the application from becoming unavailable when other services or processes compete for computing resources.

      Container Start Parameter

      • stdin: specifies that start parameters are sent to the container as standard input (stdin).

      • tty: specifies that start parameters defined in a virtual terminal are sent to the container.

      The two options are usually used together. In this case, the virtual terminal (tty) is associated to the stdin of the container. For example, an interactive program receives the stdin from the user and displays the content in the terminal.

      Privileged Container

      • If you select Privileged Container, privileged=true is specified for the container and the privilege mode is enabled.

      • If you do not select Privileged Container, privileged=false is specified for the container and the privilege mode is disabled.

      Init Container

      If you select Init Container, an init container is created. An init container contains useful utilities. For more information, see Init Containers.

    • Optional:Port settings

      Specify the container ports.

      • Name: Enter a name for the port.

      • Container Port: Enter the container port that you want to open. Enter a port number from 1 to 65535.

      • Protocol: Select TCP or UDP.

    • Optional:Environment variables

      You can configure environment variables for pods in key-value pairs. Environment variables are used to apply pod configurations to containers. For more information, see Pod variables.

      • Type: Select the type of environment variable. You can select Custom, ConfigMaps, Secrets, Value/ValueFrom, or ResourceFieldRef. If you select ConfigMaps or Secrets, you can pass all data in the selected ConfigMap or Secret to the container environment variables. In this example, Secrets is selected.

        Select Secrets from the Type drop-down list and select a Secret from the Value/ValueFrom drop-down list. By default, all data in the selected Secret is passed to the environment variable. Environments

        In this case, the YAML file used to deploy the application contains the settings that reference all data in the specified Secret. yaml

      • Variable Key: Specify the name of the environment variable.

      • Value/ValueFrom: Select the Secret from which the environment variable references data.

    • Optional:Health check settings

      Health check settings include liveness, readiness, and startup probes. Liveness probes determine when to restart the container. Readiness probes determine whether the container is ready to accept network traffic. Startup probes detect when the container has started.

      Note

      Startup probes are supported in Kubernetes 1.18 and later.

      For more information about health checks, see Configure Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Probes.

      Request type

      Parameter and description

      HTTP request

      Sends an HTTP GET request to the container. You can set the following parameters:

      • Protocol: HTTP or HTTPS.

      • Path: the requested path on the server.

      • Port: Enter the container port that you want to open. Enter a port number that ranges from 1 to 65535.

      • HTTP Header: the custom headers in the HTTP request. Duplicate headers are allowed. You can set HTTP headers in key-value pairs.

      • Initial Delay (s): the initialDelaySeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the wait time (in seconds) before the first probe is performed after the container is started. Default value: 3.

      • Period (s): the periodSeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the time interval (in seconds) at which probes are performed. Default value: 10. Minimum value: 1.

      • Timeout (s): the timeoutSeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the time (in seconds) after which a probe times out. Default value: 1. Minimum value: 1.

      • Healthy Threshold: the minimum number of times that an unhealthy container must consecutively pass health checks before it is considered healthy. Default value: 1. Minimum value: 1. For liveness probes, this parameter must be set to 1.

      • Unhealthy Threshold: the minimum number of times that a healthy container must consecutively fail health checks before it is considered unhealthy. Default value: 3. Minimum value: 1.

      TCP

      Sends a TCP socket to the container. kubelet attempts to open the socket on the specified port. If the connection can be established, the container is considered healthy. Otherwise, the container is considered unhealthy. You can configure the following parameters:

      • Port: Enter the container port that you want to open. Enter a port number that ranges from 1 to 65535.

      • Initial Delay (s): the initialDelaySeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the wait time (in seconds) before the first probe is performed after the container is started. Default value: 15.

      • Period (s): the periodSeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the time interval (in seconds) at which probes are performed. Default value: 10. Minimum value: 1.

      • Timeout (s): the timeoutSeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the time (in seconds) after which a probe times out. Default value: 1. Minimum value: 1.

      • Healthy Threshold: the minimum number of times that an unhealthy container must consecutively pass health checks before it is considered healthy. Default value: 1. Minimum value: 1. For liveness probes, this parameter must be set to 1.

      • Unhealthy Threshold: the minimum number of times that a healthy container must consecutively fail health checks before it is considered unhealthy. Default value: 3. Minimum value: 1.

      Command

      Runs a probe command in the container to check the health status of the container. You can configure the following parameters:

      • Command: the probe command that is run to check the health status of the container.

      • Initial Delay (s): the initialDelaySeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the wait time (in seconds) before the first probe is performed after the container is started. Default value: 5.

      • Period (s): the periodSeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the interval (in seconds) at which probes are performed. Default value: 10. Minimum value: 1.

      • Timeout (s): the timeoutSeconds field in the YAML file. This field specifies the time (in seconds) after which a probe times out. Default value: 1. Minimum value: 1.

      • Healthy Threshold: the minimum number of times that an unhealthy container must consecutively pass health checks before it is considered healthy. Default value: 1. Minimum value: 1. For liveness probes, this parameter must be set to 1.

      • Unhealthy Threshold: the minimum number of times that a healthy container must consecutively fail health checks before it is considered unhealthy. Default value: 3. Minimum value: 1.

    • Lifecycle settings

      You can set the following parameters to configure the lifecycle of the container: Start, Post Start, and Pre Stop. For more information, see Attach Handlers to Container Lifecycle Events.

      • Start: Set the command and parameter that take effect before the container starts.

      • Post Start: Set the command that takes effect after the container starts.

      • Pre Stop: Set the command that takes effect before the container stops.

      Lifecycle management

    • Optional:Volume settings

      You can add local storage volumes, persistent volume claims (PVCs), and PVC templates.

      • Add Local Storage: You can select HostPath, ConfigMap, Secret, or EmptyDir from the PV Type drop-down list. Then, set the Mount Source and Container Path parameters to mount the volume to a container path. For more information, see Volumes.

      • Add PVC: Select Cloud Storage.

      In this example, a PVC named disk-ssd is mounted to the /tmp path of the container. Configure a volume

    • Optional:Log configurations

      Configure Log Service. You can specify log collection configurations and add custom tags.

      Important

      Make sure that the Log Service agent is installed in the cluster.

      Parameter

      Description

      Collection Configuration

      Logstore: creates a Logstore in Log Service to store the collected log.

      Log Path in Container (Can be set to stdout): specifies stdout or a path to collect the log.

      • stdout: specifies that the stdout files are collected.

      • Text Logs: specifies that the log in the specified path of the container is collected. In this example, /var/log/nginx is specified as the path. Wildcard characters can be used in the path.

      Custom Tag

      You can also add custom tags. Custom tags are added to the container log when the log is collected. Custom tags provide an easy method to filter collected the log and perform statistical analysis.

  9. Set the parameters based on your business requirements and click Next.

  10. Optional:Configure advanced settings.

    • Access control

      Note

      You can configure the following access control settings based on your business requirements:

      • Internal applications: For applications that run inside the cluster, you can create a ClusterIP or NodePort Service to enable internal communication.

      • External applications: For applications that are exposed to the Internet, you can configure access control by using one of the following methods:

        • Create a LoadBalancer Service and enable access to your application over the Internet by using a Server Load Balancer (SLB) instance.

        • Create an Ingress and use the Ingress to expose your application to the Internet. For more information, see Ingress.

      You can also specify how the backend pods are exposed to the Internet. In this example, a ClusterIP Service and an Ingress are created to expose the NGINX application to the Internet.

      Parameter

      Description

      Services

      Click Create to the right side of Services. In the Create Service dialog box, set the parameters. For more information about the parameters, see Use Services to expose applications. Cluster IP is selected in this example.

      Ingresses

      Click Create to the right side of Ingresses. In the Create dialog box, set the parameters. For more information about how to configure an Ingress, see Create an Ingress.

      Note

      When you create an application from an image, you can create an Ingress only for one Service. In this example, a virtual hostname is used as the test domain name. You must add the following entry to the hosts file to point the domain name to the IP address of the Ingress. In actual scenarios, use a domain name that has obtained an Internet Content Provider (ICP) number.

      101.37.XX.XX   foo.bar.com    # The IP address of the Ingress.

      You can find the created Service and Ingress in the Access Control section. You can click Update or Delete to change the configurations.

    • Scaling settings

      In the Scaling section, specify whether to enable HPA and CronHPA. Horizontal Pad Autoscaler (HPA) allows you to meet the resource requirements of the application at different load levels.

      Scaling settings

      • HPA can automatically scale the number of pods in an ACK cluster based on the CPU and memory usage.

        Note

        To enable HPA, you must configure resources required by the container. Otherwise, HPA does not take effect.

        Parameter

        Description

        Metric

        Select CPU Usage or Memory Usage. The selected resource type must be the same as that specified in the Required Resources field.

        Condition

        Specify the resource usage threshold. HPA triggers scale-out events when the threshold is exceeded.

        Max. Replicas

        Specify the maximum number of pod replicas to which the application can be scaled.

        Min. Replicas

        Specify the minimum number of pod replicas that must run.

      • Cron Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (CronHPA) can scale an ACK cluster at a scheduled time. For more information about CronHPA, see Create CronHPA jobs.

    • Scheduling settings

      You can set the following parameters: Update Method, Node Affinity, Pod Affinity, Pod Anti Affinity, and Toleration. For more information, see Affinity and anti-affinity.

      Note

      Node affinity and pod affinity affect pod scheduling based on node labels and pod labels. You can add node labels and pod labels that are provided by Kubernetes to configure node affinity and pod affinity. You can also add custom labels to nodes and pods, and then configure node affinity and pod affinity based on these custom labels.

      Parameter

      Description

      Update Method

      Select Rolling Update or OnDelete. For more information, see StatefulSets.

      Node Affinity

      Set Node Affinity by selecting worker node labels as selectors.

      Node Affinity supports required rules, preferred rules, and various operators, such as In, NotIn, Exists, DoesNotExist, Gt, and Lt.

      • Required: Specify the rules that must be matched for pod scheduling. In the YAML file, these rules are defined by the requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution affinity. These rules have the same effect as the NodeSelector parameter. In this example, pods can be scheduled only to nodes with the specified labels. You can create multiple required rules. However, only one of them must be met.

      • Preferred: Specify the rules that are not required to be matched for pod scheduling. Pods are scheduled to a node that matches the preferred rules when multiple nodes match the required rules. In the YAML file, these rules are defined by the preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution affinity. In this example, the scheduler attempts to not schedule a pod to a node that matches the preferred rules. You can also set weights for preferred rules. If multiple nodes match the rule, the node with the highest weight is preferred. You can create multiple preferred rules. However, all of them must be met before the pod can be scheduled.

      Pod Affinity

      Pod affinity rules specify how pods are deployed relative to other pods in the same topology domain. For example, you can use pod affinity to deploy services that communicate with each other to the same topological domain, such as a host. This reduces the network latency between these services.

      Pod affinity enables you to specify to which node pods can be scheduled based on the labels of running pods. Pod affinity supports required and preferred rules, and the following operators: In, NotIn, Exists, and DoesNotExist.

      • Required: Specify rules that must be matched for pod scheduling. In the YAML file, these rules are defined by the requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution affinity. A node must match the required rules before pods can be scheduled to the node.

        • Namespace: Specify the namespace to apply the required rule. Pod affinity rules are defined based on the labels that are added to pods and therefore must be scoped to a namespace.

        • Topological Domain: Set the topologyKey. This specifies the key for the node label that the system uses to denote the topological domain. For example, if you set the parameter to kubernetes.io/hostname, topologies are determined by nodes. If you set the parameter to beta.kubernetes.io/os, topologies are determined by the operating systems of nodes.

        • Selector: Click Add to add pod labels.

        • View Applications: Click View Applications and set the namespace and application in the dialog box that appears. You can view the pod labels of the selected application and add these labels as selectors.

        • Required rules: Specify labels of existing applications, the operator, and the label value. In this example, the required rule specifies that the application to be created is scheduled to a host that runs applications with the app:nginx label.

      • Preferred: Specify rules that are not required to be matched for pod scheduling. In the YAML file, preferred rules are defined by the preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution affinity. The scheduler attempts to schedule the pod to a node that matches the preferred rules. You can set weights for preferred rules. The other parameters are the same as those of required rules.

        Note

        Weight: Set the weight of a preferred rule to a value from 1 to 100. The scheduler calculates the weight of each node that meets the preferred rule based on an algorithm, and then schedules the pod to the node with the highest weight.

      Pod Anti-affinity

      Pod anti-affinity rules specify that pods are not scheduled to topological domains where pods with matching labels are deployed. Pod anti-affinity rules apply to the following scenarios:

      • Schedule the pods of an application to different topological domains, such as multiple hosts. This allows you to enhance the stability of your service.

      • Grant a pod exclusive access to a node. This enables resource isolation and ensures that no other pods can share the resources of the specified node.

      • Schedule pods of an application to different hosts if the pods may interfere with each other.

      Note

      The parameters of pod anti-affinity rules are the same as those of pod affinity rules. Create rules based on scenarios.

      Toleration

      Configure toleration rules to allow pods to be scheduled to nodes with matching taints.

      Schedule to Virtual Nodes

      Specify whether to schedule pods to virtual nodes. This parameter is unavailable if the cluster does not contain a virtual node.

    • Labels and annotations

      • Pod Labels: Add a label to the pod. The label is used to identify the application.

      • Pod Annotations: Add an annotation to the pod.

  11. Click Create.

  12. View the deployed application.

    1. After the application is created, you are redirected to the Complete wizard page. You can find the resource objects included in the application and click View Details to view application details.

      The details page of the created stateful application appears.

    2. In the upper-left corner of the page, click the Back icon to go to the StatefulSets page. On the StatefulSets page, you can view the created application.

Other operations

On the StatefulSets page, click the name of the application that you want to manage or click Details in the Actions column.

Note

On the StatefulSets page, you can click Label, enter the key and value of a label added to the application, and then click OK to filter the applications.

On the details page of the application, you can View in YAML to view the YAML file of the application. You can also edit, scale, redeploy, and refresh the application.

  • Edit: On the details page of the application, click Edit in the upper-right corner of the page to modify the configurations of the application.

  • Scale: On the details page of the application, click Scale in the upper-right corner of the page to scale the application to a required number of pods.

    In this example, the NGINX application that you created is used to test the scalability.

    1. Find the NGINX application that you created and click Scale in the Actions column.

    2. In the Scale dialog box, set Desired Number of Pods to 3 and click OK. After you scale out the application, all pods in the application are listed based on ordinal indexes in ascending order. If you scale in the application, pods are deleted based on ordinal indexes in descending order. This ensures that all pods follow a specific order.

    3. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Volumes > Persistent Volume Claims. Verify that after you scale out the application, new PVs and PVCs are created for the newly added pods. However, if the application is scaled in, existing PVs and PVCs are not deleted.

  • View in YAML: On the details page of the application, click View in YAML in the upper-right corner of the page. In the Edit YAML dialog box, you can update and download the YAML file. You can also click Save As to save the YAML file as a different name.

  • Redeploy: On the details page of the application, click Redeploy in the upper-right corner of the page to redeploy the application.

  • Refresh: On the details page of the application, click Refresh in the upper-right corner of the page to refresh the application details page.

What to do next

Log on to a master node and run the following commands to test persistent storage.

  1. Run the following command to create a temporary file in the disk:

    kubectl exec nginx-1 -- ls /tmp            # Query files (including lost+found) in the /tmp directory. 
    kubectl exec nginx-1 -- touch /tmp/statefulset         # Create a file named statefulset. 
    kubectl exec nginx-1 -- ls /tmp

    Expected output:

    lost+found
    statefulset
  2. Run the following command to delete the pod to verify data persistence:

    kubectl delete pod nginx-1

    Expected output:

    pod"nginx-1"deleted
  3. After the system recreates and starts a new pod, query the files in the /tmp directory. The following result shows that the statefulset file still exists. This shows the high availability of the stateful application.

    kubectl exec nginx-1 -- ls /tmp   # Query files (including lost+found) in the /tmp directory to verify data persistence. 

    Expected output:

    statefulset