[deforciant]

totally agree :) I have been running Kubernetes in production for several years now on multiple projects. So far I had no need to use any CRDs or even Helm. Just well maintained deployments, services, secrets and ingress manifests.

[RexM]

I've started trying to learn more about kubernetes by setting up some personal services and it seems like everything I find online points to some helm chart to install.

I think because I don't fully understand k8s, yet, helm seems too magical. It's abstracting away what I already don't understand and doesn't feel right.

For now, I've been focusing on writing my manifests and applying them with kubectl to get a feel for what's going on under the hood. Maybe a time will come where it's a tool that I'll need to reach for, though.

[streetcat1]

So how do you run stateful workloads? E.g. postgres or mysql?

[zinclozenge]

Generally speaking, you probably shouldn't run databases in k8s unless you need to scale them dynamically, or cloud disk performance is acceptable to you. Having said that, k8s is getting a lot of support for running databases on local disks. A lot of newsql databases (CockroachDB, TiDB, Yugabyte, Vitess, etc) are shipping with strong k8s support/integration.

[jinqueeny]

As a matter of fact, we recently released the 1.0 GA version of TiDB Operator: https://github.com/pingcap/tidb-operator