How to deploy highly available SQL Server 2017 on Linux on GKE

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. Running a SQL Server database on Kubernetes is a topic of discussion nowadays as Kubernetes provides ways to provision stateful containers using persistent volumes, statefulsets, etc. The following post is a tutorial we recently published on Google's Partner Solutions that demonstrates how to provision a single instance of SQL Server 2017 on Linux on GKE using Regional persistent disks. The deployment provides synchronous replication between two zones, thus providing resiliency against zone failure. The walkthrough will show you how to create a GKE cluster, create a Kubernetes secret, create the StorageClass and PersistentVolumeClaim, set up and deploy SQL Server, connect to SQL Server, and most importantly, simulate a zone failure.

This deployment might not be suitable for mission-critical or large workloads. Instead, Pythian recommends this deployment for smaller workloads in production, development, and staging environments.

Enjoy!