Which Kubernetes resource is used to manage the deployment and lifecycle of stateful workloads?

• A. Deployments
• B. DaemonSets
• C. StatefulSets
• D. Jobs

Answer: (C)

Stateful workloads need stable network identities and persistent storage across restarts, and StatefulSets provide that by giving each pod a stable, unique name with an ordinal index and, when you use volumeClaimTemplates, a dedicated PersistentVolumeClaim for each replica. This guarantees that data sticks with the correct pod and that you can address a specific replica reliably, which is essential for databases and other stateful services. StatefulSets also manage the lifecycle in a controlled way with ordered deployment and scaling, so pods come up or go down in sequence, preserving application state and startup order. They rely on a headless Service to expose stable network identities, giving each pod a predictable DNS name like statefulset-name-ordinal. For updates, StatefulSets support controlled rolling updates with partitioning, allowing you to update a subset of replicas in a safe, orderly fashion. In contrast, Deployments are best for stateless workloads without stable identities or per-pod storage guarantees, DaemonSets ensure one pod per node without managing a set of ordered replicas, and Jobs run to completion for batch tasks rather than continuous stateful services.