KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019

Operating stateful applications is a challenge and Elasticsearch clusters are no exception. At Zalando, the search infrastructure heavily rely on large scale Elasticsearch clusters consisting of 100s of nodes.

In this talk Mikkel present how Zalando utilize Kubernetes and the operator pattern as introduced by CoreOS, to reliably and cost efficiently operate large scale Elasticsearch clusters.

The talk will walk through how the Elasticsearch operator was designed, what problems it solves and how building it from the bottom up allowed getting it in production fast, gather more learnings and later extending the featureset to make it less manual to operate and reducing the cost of the overall infrastructure.

While the talk revolves around running Elasticsearch, the ideas presented also apply to running other types of stateful applications in Kubernetes.