Managing Cloud Native Data on Kubernetes

Chapter 7. The Kubernetes Native Database

The software industry is flush with terms that define major trends in a single word or short phrase. You can see one of them in the title of this book: cloud native. Another example is microservice, a major architectural paradigm that touches much of the technology we’re discussing here. More recently, terms like Kubernetes native and serverless have emerged.

While succinct and catchy, distilling a complex topic or trend down to a single sound bite leaves room for ambiguity, or at least for reasonable questions such as “What does this actually mean?” To further muddy the waters, terms such as these are frequently used in the context of marketing products as a way to gain leverage or differentiate against other competitive offerings. Whether the content you’re consuming makes an overt statement or it’s just the subtext, you may have wondered whether a given technology must be better to run on Kubernetes than other offerings because it’s labeled Kubernetes native.

Of course, for these terms to be useful to us in evaluating and picking the right technologies for our applications, the real task is to unpack what they really mean, as we did with the term cloud native data in Chapter 1. In this chapter, we’ll look at what it means for data technology to be Kubernetes native and see if we can arrive at a definition that we can agree on. To do this, we’ll examine a couple of projects that claim these terms and derive the common ...