Prefer Cloud Over Kubernetes

Prefer your cloud provider service over a kubernetes chart

You can deploy a database via a helm chart in your kubernetes cluster. Or you can configure your cloud provider to create a managed database offering.

You can deploy, say, vault as helm charts inside your kubernetes cluster. Or you can use your cloud providers secret store solution such as:

  • Alibaba Cloud KMS Secret Manager
  • Amazon Secret Manager
  • Azure Key Vault
  • GCP Secret Manager

However installing a chart in kubernetes is a very different thing to having a fully managed service which considers things like:

  • backups and replication of state across regions
  • upgrades and schema migration

So we recommend using the cloud provider implementation for things like databases, secret stores, log storage and and other services as it removes undifferentiated heavy lifting.

More background here

Note that we absolutely love kubernetes; this pattern is not in any way a criticism of kubernetes. Its more that adopting this pattern is about outsourcing work work in managing, migrating, backing up and restoring persistent state to your cloud provider.