Say Goodbye to Managed Databases and Hello to Data Sovereignty

Explore how to achieve true data sovereignty and multi-cloud flexibility by managing stateful applications directly in Kubernetes rather than relying on cloud-managed database services. This 25-minute conference talk from PlatformCon 2025 demonstrates how platform engineers can reduce complexity and increase application portability by leveraging Kubernetes' uniform API for both stateless and stateful workloads. Discover the limitations that cloud-managed database services impose on portability and learn how they increase cognitive load when managing multiple environments. The session includes a 20-minute lecture examining how cloud-managed services create complexity barriers, followed by a 60-minute hands-on laboratory component where participants deploy real-world stateful applications with persistent storage across multiple cloud environments. Gain practical experience proving that cloud-managed services are not essential for data management while unlocking the full potential of Kubernetes for comprehensive application deployment strategies.