In a World of Ephemeral Containers, How Do We Keep Track of Things?

Emerging patterns for keeping state in clusters of containers. A review of the challenges, solutions and their tradeoffs for keeping track of things when running a cluster of ephemeral containers. We will cover both configuration management and data storage (databases, etc), a survey of the different ways people are dealing with these challenges on the Google Cloud Platform. We will focus on systems using Kubernetes, an open source cluster manager and scheduler that simplifies deploying and managing applications running large numbers of containers. These patterns are applicable in a wide range of situations including using PaaS or VMs directly.