Scaling Stateful Applications in Kubernetes: EKS + EFS.

2 min readMay 31, 2023

Motivation:

Kubernetes is widely recognized for its ability to manage containerized applications at scale. However, when it comes to managing stateful applications, certain considerations must be addressed. This article explores the challenges faced in scaling stateful applications and presents solutions for seamless scalability.

Let’s consider a scenario where we have an application consisting of two microservices that communicate and require a shared volume to support specific processing operations.

Additionally, the data generated by these services need to be retained for further analysis.

Requirement:

To ensure scalability among worker nodes, it is necessary to implement a solution that meets the following criteria:

The pods must have access to a shared persistent volume.

Create EFS

We are not going into the details of creating EFS. Assuming we have an existing EFS already.

my efs mount id: fs-582a0sdat

Make sure to create an access point. Access points are mount paths in EFS where the data should be accessed.

my efs access point /tmp/poc-efs

Deploy EFS driver in the cluster

Checkout the official document from AWS for EFS driver:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/efs-csi.html

Create Storageclass

This is to define a storage class that tells the k8s to this resource to provision volumes. There are a lot of provisioners like EBS, GCE PD, EFS etc.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/storage-classes/#provisioner

We are using EFS provisioner for our usecase.

storageClass.yaml

kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: efs-sc
provisioner: efs.csi.aws.com
parameters:
  provisioningMode: efs-ap
  fileSystemId: fs-582a0sdat
  directoryPerms: "700"
  gidRangeStart: "1000" # optional
  gidRangeEnd: "2000" # optional
  basePath: "/dynamic_provisioning" # optional

kubectl apply -f storageclass.yaml

Verify the installation.

kubectl get pods -n kube-system | grep efs-csi-controller

Create a persistent volume and persistent volume claim.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: efs-pv1
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 5Gi
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteMany
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  storageClassName: efs-sc
  mountOptions:
    - tls
  csi:
    driver: efs.csi.aws.com
    volumeHandle: fs-582a0sdat:/tmp/poc-efs

-----------
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: efs-claim
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteMany
  storageClassName: efs-sc
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 5Gi

Verify the status

kubectl get pv,pvc

Deploy Application

Let’s use it in our deployment spec

deployment.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: efs-app
  labels:
    app: efs-app
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: efs-app
  containers:
    - name: myapp
      image: centos
      command: ["/bin/sh"]
      args: ["-c", "while true; do echo $(date -u) >> /data/out; sleep 5; done"]
      volumeMounts:
        - name: persistent-storage
          mountPath: /data
  volumes:
    - name: persistent-storage
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: efs-claim

kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml

Now bash into the pods and the mount path can be accessed across the pods.

Thank you, Happy Provisioning!

References: