Calculate storage and compute requirements for a StatefulSet's ordered replicas.
Each StatefulSet replica gets its own PersistentVolumeClaim via volumeClaimTemplates, so total storage scales linearly with replica count. By default StatefulSets use the OrderedReady pod management policy, starting pods one at a time and waiting for each to become Ready before starting the next — which means full startup time scales linearly with replica count too, unless podManagementPolicy is set to Parallel.
Total storage
totalStorage = replicas × pvcSize
Startup time
startupTime = parallelPodManagement ? podStartup : podStartup × replicas
Deployments start all replicas concurrently by default. StatefulSets default to OrderedReady, which is deliberately sequential — this preserves a strict identity/ordering guarantee (pod-0 before pod-1, etc.) that ordered clustered systems like ZooKeeper or Kafka rely on during bootstrap.
When your application doesn't depend on strict startup ordering for cluster formation — e.g. it handles peer discovery independently. Databases with leader election or ordered bootstrap sequences usually require OrderedReady.
Yes — with OrderedReady, pods are terminated in reverse ordinal order (highest first), and PVCs are retained by default (not automatically deleted) unless you configure a persistentVolumeClaimRetentionPolicy.