The Storage Crashcourse - From CSI to Databases
03-18, 16:30–17:00 (Europe/Paris), VIP Area

Storage, Persistence and Databases are important parts of most Kubernetes operations. It is a broad topic which this talk tries to demystify. We will go over how Kubernetes storage works, how CSI fits into it, which storage provider options are out there, and how to select the right one for your environment.

Another topic I will talk about is backups and disaster recovery, which will be covered by explaining how CSI Snapshots work and how to make your backups ransomware-proof.

There are also Storage patterns that do not use normal file systems, like S3-style Object Storage and Databases. I will give you some inspiration how and where to integrate them into your applications with the goal to decrease cost and increase performance.

I am going to share some practical experiences on running SQL Databases in your clusters and how to ensure reliability and ease of use.


This is a overview talk targeting an beginner to intermediate level audience. The following topics are covered:
- The Kubernetes Persistence Model (PVs, PVCs, Provisioning, Storage Classes)
- What is CSI?
- Selecting a Storage Provider (Local Path, Cloud Provider CSI drivers, Ceph, Longhorn and JuiceFS)
- Backups with K8up
- When is S3 a better fit
- Databases in a cluster (Experiences with CNPG, Zalando Postgres and MySQL Operator)

Benjamin Ritter is a Cloud Systems Engineer with the IT consulting firm Scandio GmbH. Benjamin has multiple years experience designing Cloud architectures focused around Kubernetes. In his daily work he assists customers in their journey to the cloud.
He is also involved in the open source community and contributes to open source projects, like JuiceFS