Executive summary
The migration to cloud-native architectures delivered unprecedented agility for application development, yet for most enterprises, the database remains a significant bottleneck, tethered to legacy architectures or expensive, proprietary Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) platforms. This disconnect actively undermines the primary goals of cloud adoption by creating operational friction, unpredictable costs, and significant strategic risks related to vendor lock-in and compliance. Sticking with the status quo is a direct impediment to growth and innovation.
Rising AI infrastructure spend is accelerating this shift: when public-cloud AI costs approach roughly 60–70% of dedicated alternatives, the economics favor owned or colocated infrastructure, pushing leaders to unify databases and adjacent AI workloads on portable platforms.
Research shows that organizations capable of deploying software quickly, frequently, and reliably achieve revenue growth five times faster than their peers.
This paper makes the business case for a strategic shift: adopting open source databases on Kubernetes as the new standard for the enterprise data layer. This approach solves three critical challenges for CIOs:
Control of cloud economics. With an estimated 27% of cloud spend being wasted (due to idle or overprovisioned resources), organizations are re-evaluating the opaque, markup-heavy pricing of DBaaS. A detailed TCO analysis within this document, based on common production configurations, reveals that a Kubernetes-based open source solution can be over 50% less expensive in direct infrastructure costs for the same workload, demonstrating the value of structural cost transparency.
Faster database deployment. Slow database provisioning is a major constraint on time-to-market. Research shows that organizations capable of deploying software quickly, frequently, and reliably (often called 'elite performers') achieve revenue growth five times faster than their peers. By unifying the data layer on the same Kubernetes platform used for applications, organizations can eliminate slow provisioning, enabling true developer self-service and dramatically accelerating the entire development lifecycle.
Architectural freedom. Committing to a proprietary DBaaS creates significant vendor lock-in, a direct conflict with the 89% of enterprises pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. A Kubernetes-native open source platform is fundamentally portable, preserving architectural freedom and future-proofing the organization against vendor price hikes and licensing changes.
Moving production databases to Kubernetes does require addressing team skills and tooling maturity. However, as the enterprise implementations in this paper demonstrate, these are temporary challenges with clear solutions. The alternative—choosing not to act—accepts permanent costs: ongoing agility constraints, escalating vendor lock-in, and compounding technical debt.