Data is the remaining elephant in the room. Containers have made code and config ephemeral and trivially replicable. But then you get to data, which represents

Data is the remaining elephant in the room. Containers have made code and config ephemeral and trivially replicable. But then you get to data, which represents billions of actually valuable magnetized bits of platter or flipped nand gates or whatever. It's like butterflies and battleships. One approach, as another reply suggested, is to mount external volumes into the container, i.e. a persistent disk on GCP or Amazon EBS (or even a GCS or S3 bucket). This works, but of course the container, hosting the software that makes the data meaningful, is now bolted to a physical thing. It can no longer be moved, auto-scaled, etc. It can be monitored and restarted and you still get all the benefits of dependency isolation and repeatability. I'd still much, much rather run a DB this way than installing it directly onto an instance, but there's no use pretending that we can do with data what we can now do with code and config. It's still a cement block chained to our ankles.