Sitecore 10 AKS Development Instance - SQL Persistence

Question

I have followed Barts’ excellent tutorial to get a development instance of Sitecore 10.2 up and running on AKS.

https://github.com/bplasmeijer/Sitecore-Symposium-2020-Containers-AKS

There is one flaw though, when the windows AKS node gets restarted (patching etc) the SQL database gets wiped entirely. Sure, a dev environment should be ephemeral, but I want the DB to persist beyond a machine restart. I was looking to add persistence with a volume mount for the data folder from below image, is that possible? If so what is the folder mount path?

image: scr.sitecore.com/sxp/nonproduction/mssql-developer:2017-10.0-ltsc2019

The alternative is to use the below Microsoft image on a Linux node (Microsoft don’t support a Windows SQL Image), or PaaS Azure SQL – I am shying away from those from a cost perspective for a dev instance, although the linux node is probably palatable.

image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2019-latest

Answer 1

I think a Persistent Volume Claim might be what you are looking for. This effectively creates a storage account in your azure subscription and saves the data from the SQL to it.

Try something like this:

Create new storage class using azure-file-sc.yaml

kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: sitecore-azurefile
provisioner: file.csi.azure.com
allowVolumeExpansion: true
mountOptions:
  - dir_mode=0777
  - file_mode=0777
  - uid=0
  - gid=0
  - mfsymlinks
  - cache=strict
  - actimeo=30
parameters:
  skuName: Premium_LRS

Create new persistent volume claim using azure-file-pvc.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: sitecore-pvc
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteMany
  storageClassName: sitecore-azurefile
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 100Gi

Update Barts SQL deployment to something like below:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: mssql
spec:
  selector:
    app: mssql
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 1433
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: mssql
  labels:
    app: mssql
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: mssql
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: mssql
    spec:
      nodeSelector:
        kubernetes.io/os: windows
      containers:
      - name: mssql
        image: scr.sitecore.com/sxp/nonproduction/mssql-developer:2017-10.0.0-ltsc2019
        ports:
        - containerPort: 1433
        env:
        - name: SA_PASSWORD
          valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
              name: sitecore-database
              key: sitecore-databasepassword.txt
        - name: ACCEPT_EULA
          value: "Y"
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: "/mnt/azure"
        name: sitecore-persistent-volume
      volumes:
        - name: sitecore-persistent-volume
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: sitecore-pvc
      imagePullSecrets:
      - name: sitecore-docker-registry

Note: I havent tested this out, but it should hopefully point you in the correct direction if not quite correct.

Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/azure-files-dynamic-pv