Stateful Scaling: Laravel Session Management in Kubernetes Clusters.
Kubernetes is an excellent option for scaling Laravel applications. Kubernetes offers scalability, high availability, service discovery, and load balancing. Specifically for Laravel deployments, Kubernetes can help with stateless horizontal scaling, easy management of background processing, and storage flexibility. But it can come at a cost. The ephemerality of Kubernetes pods and the way they scale makes session management in Laravel difficult. Using the default file session driver can lead to lost data if the pod restarts or is replaced, so developers must shift to a different mechanism. Here, we want to take you through some of the gotchas in Laravel session management you’ll experience as you move to a Kubernetes deployment. The good news is that they are all fixable with an understanding of the internal workings of containerization.