Hosting external data services
In production deployments, you must host the required Sitecore XP external services outside the Kubernetes cluster.
The external hosted services for Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Solr (SolrCloud mode), and RedisLabs Redis are required for production Kubernetes support from Sitecore.
You must deploy and configure the external services for production use before you deploy Sitecore XP to Kubernetes.
To deploy the required database, search schemas, and the required data, the Sitecore container deployment package includes Kubernetes data initialization jobs for Microsoft SQL Server and Apache Solr (SolrCloud mode).
RedisLabs Redis external services do not require initialization. The required cache databases are created during first use.
You must complete the data initialization jobs before you deploy the Sitecore software containers.
For more information about data initialization, see the Deploy Data Initialization Jobs section in Deploy Sitecore XP to the Azure Kubernetes Service.
Application database user credentials
Sitecore Kubernetes specification files are designed to deploy containers that use application database users to connect to the databases. The MSSQL Data Initialization Job uses the credentials provided in the Sitecore-database Secret to create an application database user for each database.
The application database user name Secrets have default values. You must provide passwords for all of them.
For example, you specify the application database user credentials used to connect to the Sitecore Master database in the sitecore-master-database-username.txt and sitecore-master-database-password.txt Secrets files.
The content in secrets must be encoded in UTF-8 format.
For a complete list of application database user credentials Secrets, see the appendix The Kubernetes Secrets list.