Cloud-Native Computing Continues to Reshape the Space
The Long & Short
There aren’t enough DBAs in the world to scale linearly with your ever-expanding database count and increasingly demanding AI workloads. Cloud-native database deployments using tools like Kubernetes offer businesses greater scalability, automation, and resilience—essential for adapting quickly in a fast-changing market. Decision-makers should prioritize adopting these modern data architectures—including a platform-engineered control plane with policy‑as‑code, cost governance, and automated remediation—to stay competitive and future-ready.
According to the 2024 Data on Kubernetes (DoK) Community Report, databases are the #1 workload on Kubernetes for the third consecutive year. Nearly half of organizations now run 50% or more of their database workloads in production on Kubernetes, with the most advanced running over 75% in production.This growth of cloud-native deployments in the database landscape is introducing new levels of operational scalability, flexibility, and operational efficiency for organizations and their rapidly-growing data footprints and increasingly complex infrastructures.
Just as containerization has become the backbone of modern application development, the next frontier is making stateful systems like databases behave like cloud-native workloads. This shift is critical for meeting the demands of continuous deployment, elastic scaling, and hybrid infrastructure—all driven by the ever-evolving volume and variety of data in the modern enterprise.
Why Cloud-Native Matters for Databases & How Kubernetes is Keeping This Future Open
Traditional database deployments assume stability and manual oversight. But in a world of ephemeral containers, multi-region failover, and API-driven provisioning, this approach is untenable. Enterprises are turning to cloud-native patterns to achieve:
- Scalability: On-demand resizing of database resources based on workload or cost constraints.
- Resilience: Automated failover and recovery with minimal human intervention.
- Portability: Unified deployment models across clouds, regions, and edge environments.
The growing adoption of cloud-native and hybrid database approaches, particularly in the context of AI workloads, will prove essential to the future of database management. Open source solutions like Kubernetes are enabling more on-premises and hybrid deployments, providing organizations with more flexibility and control over their data infrastructure.
Liz Warner
CTO
Percona
With Kubernetes as the foundation, databases can now run close to users, across geographies, or within regulated on-premise environments—all with minimal effort and without the need to build and rebuild data pipelines.
The Path to Cloud-Native Competency
By embracing Kubernetes and cloud-native principles, enterprises unlock a new class of operational efficiency. They stand to gain operational agility, with less friction experienced in spinning up and tearing down environments. Meanwhile, automated turning and elastic scaling help to contain costs and provide greater control over one’s database environment.
Ultimately, the cloud-native approach redefines databases not as static infrastructure, but as programmable, composable services that evolve with the pace of business.
Kubernetes isn’t just about scalability, it also provides a kind of continuous resiliency that simply isn’t possible without it. If you have issues that need to be resolved, patching that needs to be done, or a new deployment on deck, you can get things done with little-to-no disruption. Processes that used to require an hour of downtime now require just a few minutes, if at all. That’s why Kubernetes has become indispensable for our operations.
Diego Martin Infiesta
IT Infrastructure Manager
Ryanair