Have you already tried to install a Sitecore module package in a Sitecore instance running on Azure Kubernetes Service or in your local containerized environment? If you have, you probably already know that the installation process fails, because the application user identity doesn’t have the permission to write the uploaded module package in the packages data folder. The Sitecore documentation describes the recommended approach to add a Sitecore module to the images of a containerized solution using the module asset images, and this approach works well for a development environment where external services (SQL server, Solr, Redis) run in containers. But for a production environment running in Azure Kubernetes Service, the external services will likely not run in a container but they will use PaaS or IaaS resources instead, like for example databases running in an Azure SQL Server elastic pool resource. In this production-like scenario, a different solution is required to deploy data assets of a module to an existing external service layer and this solution consists in using data initialization containers that run in Kubernetes initialization jobs. In this blog post I will share my learnings about initialization jobs and data initialization containers and the steps needed to deploy a Sitecore module to an existing Sitecore instance running on Azure Kubernetes Service.

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