Spotlight

Database State Management in Kubernetes: Running SQL Server on AKS with GitOps

Firas Sboui

This case study shows how to run SQL Server on Azure Kubernetes Service using StatefulSets, persistent volumes, and GitOps for multi-tenant database deployments.

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Tools and utilities

  • Seabird: desktop client

    Seabird is a native cross-platform Kubernetes desktop client that makes exploring your cluster's resources easy.

  • Stakpak: Open Source DevOps AI Agent

    Stakpak is an open source terminal AI agent for DevOps that generates infrastructure code, debugs Kubernetes, and automates deployments — with secret substitution so the LLM never sees your actual credentials.

  • MariaDB operator

    The MariaDB operator lets you declaratively manage your MariaDB using Kubernetes CRDs rather than imperative commands.

  • ch-vmm: cloud hypervisor

    ch-vmm lets you run Cloud Hypervisor virtual machines inside Kubernetes like regular pods with support for snapshots, rollbacks, and multi-VM management.

  • ArgoCD-agent

    This tool extends Argo CD with a hub-and-spoke agent architecture in which lightweight agents in remote clusters connect back to a central control plane.

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Intelligent Kubernetes Load Balancing
Intelligent Kubernetes Load Balancing

You're running gRPC services in Kubernetes, load balancing looks fine on the dashboard — but some pods are burning at 80% CPU while others sit idle, and adding more replicas only partially helps.

Rohit Agrawal, a Staff Software Engineer on the traffic platform team at Databricks, explains why this happens and how his team replaced Kubernetes's default networking with a proxy-less, client-side load-balancing system built on the xDS protocol.

In this episode:

  • Why KubeProxy's Layer 4 routing breaks down under high-throughput gRPC: it picks a backend once per TCP connection, not per request
  • How Databricks built an Endpoint Discovery Service (EDS) that watches Kubernetes directly and streams real-time pod metadata to every client
  • How zone-aware spillover cut cross-availability-zone costs without sacrificing availability
  • Why CPU-based routing failed (monitoring lag creates oscillation) and what signals to use instead

The system has been running in production for three years across hundreds of services, handling millions of requests.

Learn from production

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Matching jobs

    • DevOps Engineer with Oddball

    • Salary: $110K to $145K a year

    • Location: remote from

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, Python, CDK, Cloudformation, GitHub Actions

    • DevOps Engineer with Point72

    • Salary: US$108.45K to US$275K a year

    • Location: based in the office in Singapore, SG

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, Docker, Powershell, Python, Cloudformation, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Gitlab, Jenkins, Ansible

    • DevOps Engineer with Postman

    • Salary: $213.51K to $275K a year

    • Location: based in the office (and remote from home) in San Francisco, CA, USA

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, Helm, ArgoCD, Docker, Python, Cloudformation, Terraform

    • DevOps Engineer with Proton

    • Salary: $99.9K to $275K a year

    • Location: based in the office in Paris, FR

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Python, Rust, Terraform, Ansible

    • DevOps Engineer with SurveyMonkey

    • Salary: $1.27L to $3.03L a year

    • Location: based in the office (and remote from home) in Bengaluru, IN

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, AWS, Helm, ArgoCD, Docker, Java, PHP, Python, Redis, PostgreSQL

Discover more Kubernetes jobs on Kube Careers →

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    • The conference starts on the 6 May 2026.

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    The Call For Paper is open until 19 April 2026 at GMT-4. More info →
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    • The conference starts on the 21 November 2026.

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