Hi, I'm actually really sorry I don't post too much and I think when I do I am making the comments a bit short and its causing confusion. I hope this clears things up and is a bit helpful.

To explain the context, I find there seems to be a lack of clarity around K8s. Lets just say, for this post's purposes, I am a _user_ of k8s. That is, I don't actually run the cluster at all, I don't manage its storage, I am operating as a User without full admin access.

I also work in VMware who has the whole Tanzu thing going on so what happened was internal IT set up a K8s cluster for production hosting (maybe it was dogfooding or something I'm not really involved with that team, user only as I said).

I got frustrated when figuring out how to use it however. A bunch of online material is about setting up the K8s infrastructure/cluster, rather than using it as a Dev.

I hope this makes a bit more sense when I said redis was practically zero config.

To explain the setup. I code a python app, and I use docker compose and a single docker-compose.YAML. This YAML gives the build instructions for my app, and minimally (by this I mean with absolute minimal config options) also sets up a postgresDB, RabbitMQ and Redis.

Here's what I mean by minimal:

        redis:
                image: XXXXXXX.YYYYYY.com/dockerhub-proxy-cache/library/redis
                restart: always
                container_name: redis
                command: redis-server --requirepass XXXXXXX 
                ports:
                        - 6379:6379
                environment:
                        - REDIS_REPLICATION_MODE=master
                labels:
                  kompose.volume.storage-class-name: 1XXXXUUIDProvidedByPlatformXXXX1
                  kompose.volume.size: 1Gi
                volumes:
                        - ~/.docker-conf/redis/data/:/data/
                deploy:
                  resources:
                    limits:
                      cpus: '0.5'
                      memory: 2G
                    reservations:
                      cpus: '.1'
                      memory: 20M

I consider this minimal as most of it is boiler plate and I'm just configuring its resources.

So for dev when I want a local spin up I docker-compose build, docker-compose up.

As you can see above,

        volumes:
                - ~/.docker-conf/redis/data/:/data/ 

Gives it persistent storage across builds and deploys.

So to my mind this was pretty easy so far. Then I looked at what was needed to deploy on K8S and I nearly puked. Sorry there is no way I was touching that mess of yaml.

So I just use kompose-convert which uses the single docker-compose.yaml to auto generate all the little yaml babies needed for deploying to staging and prod (the K8S cluster).

Script is essentially:

        docker-compose build
        docker push corpImageLibrary/App:mar-felly2022(version)
        cd ./kubernetes-deploy-files && kompose convert -f ../docker-compose.yml

That's it. Regarding persistent storage which I use, I define that with the docker Kompose label in the main docker-compose.yaml. The goal just being a single file to config everything.

When I kill the deployment I just don't kill the persistent disks, and then deploy all the auto generated yamls at once (including the persistent disks, which wont overwrite them if they exist)

Deploy script:

        #!/bin/bash
        cd ./kubernetes-deploy-files
        kubectl --kubeconfig ../Kubeconfig apply -f \
        db-claim0-persistentvolumeclaim.yaml,\
        db-deployment.yaml,\
        db-service.yaml,\
        fluentd-config.yml,\
        rabbitmq-deployment.yaml,\
        rabbitmq-service.yaml,\
        redis-claim0-persistentvolumeclaim.yaml,\
        redis-deployment.yaml,\
        redis-service.yaml,\
        MYAPP-deployment.yaml,\
        MYAPP-service.yaml

Kill script:

        #!/bin/bash
        cd ./kubernetes-deploy-files
        kubectl --kubeconfig ../Kubeconfig delete -f \
        db-deployment.yaml,\
        db-service.yaml,\
        rabbitmq-deployment.yaml,\
        rabbitmq-service.yaml,\
        redis-deployment.yaml,\
        redis-service.yaml,\
        MYAPP-deployment.yaml,\
        MYAPP-service.yaml

(note I haven't made any edits on any of these yamls they are all auto-generated)

To me this is minimal config compared to trying to integrate with a third party outside of my app network (needing corporate firewall exceptions etc etc). But yea there is internal hosted redis offerings I think but even then I made a pass as the above is just very easy and neat.

Also the persistent disks are all backed up in the background.

I guess it's minimal config when you already have a nice K8S setup ready to use would be a fairer statement :)

Hope this is useful to someone just trying to get a dam app running!