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Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week we spoke with Ryan Staatz, head of DevOps at LogDNA, about running stateful services on Kubernetes, as part of our series of posts and podcasts on the challenges of running Kubernetes in 2020.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

Each month on The New Stack, we pick ta heme to devote a certain amount of coverage, issues that we hear are important to our readers. This month, we looked at one of the ongoing challenges for Kubernetes around how to run stateful applications.

As Staatz explains in his post on the subject, “A Blueprint for Running Stateful Services on Kubernetes,”

“State” refers to the condition that an application is in at a particular point in time. A stateful application changes its behavior based on previous transactions; in other words, it maintains a memory of the past. Examples of stateful applications include databases, caches, and content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress. With stateful applications, the application must have a location where it can store its state as data. This data needs to be available to the application throughout its lifespan. In a basic single-server, single-instance application, this could be as easy as storing data directly on the host filesystem.

We chat with Staatz about his preferred approaches to running stateful applications on Kubernetes, as well as how LogDNA supports these architectures with its own logging service. Then, later in the show, we discuss some other recenet posts on the topic: Analyst Janakiram MSV in his post, “Different Approaches for Building Stateful Kubernetes Applications,” reveals that there are a number of different ways to provide stateful support to K8s. A Q&A with Saad Ali, the chair of the Kubernetes Storage Special Interest Group at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, discusses the work already done to make run stateful workloads easier, as well as the challenges that remain and what to look for in the future.

We also give a listen to The New Stack Makers podcast with InfluxData’s Chris Churilo, who offers some perspective on why organizations increasingly rely on time series databases to “make products or services better.”