As Kubernetes matures, features such as StatefulSets give the ecosystem new capabilities that allow users to deploy applications that have much different requirements than stateless microservices. Since the stable release of StatefulSets in 2018, many efforts have been made to deploy applications, such as Kafka and Postgres, that rely on pods having a one-to-one relationship with a persistent filesystem, usually in the form of a mounted block device. Combined with improvements to the provisioning capabilities within the Kubernetes, it is easier than ever to deploy a stateful system, such as Humio, on many of the Kubernetes backplanes provided by the leading cloud providers.

As more practitioners look towards consolidating their microservices and stateful workloads, it was imperative that Humio began to understand the dynamics of running our software within Kubernetes with ingest rates at and above what our customers are doing today. I chose to use Google Cloud Platform’s Kubernetes platform, GKE, due to our recent positive experience with customer deployments and proof of concept deployments.