CockroachDB on Kubernetes
Run distributed SQL on Kubernetes, without turning every database operation into a runbook
Deploy and operate CockroachDB through the Kubernetes workflows your platform team already uses. The CockroachDB Kubernetes Operator brings database-aware automation to secure deployment, scaling, rolling upgrades, storage, observability, and multi-region operations—while CockroachDB keeps transactional data consistent and available across failures.
No downtime upgrades, patches & schema changes
As a distributed database, CockroachDB allows you to roll software updates, patches, and schema modifications to each node, one at a time without service disruption. And with our Kubernetes Operator, we’ve made managing these changes even easier.
Don’t federate clusters, distribute data
Multi-master, Guaranteed transactions
Break free from manual sharding and complex workarounds. CockroachDB dramatically simplifies scaling applications. Expand with simple, familiar SQL DML.
Multi-region, Multi-cluster
CockroachDB can be deployed across multiple Kubernetes clusters and function like a single logical database, eliminating the need to federate clusters.
The CockroachDB Kubernetes Operator
While CockroachDB doesn't need an operator for many of its fundamental capabilities, there are some areas an operator can help and we’ve delivered our operator to help make CockroachDB the easiest and most effective database available for Kubernetes.
What workloads are right for CockroachDB?
CockroachDB allows you to build data-intensive applications with greater efficiency. It is the database of choice for your modern workloads running in the cloud and is in production, serving global (and local) data to thousands of breakthrough applications.
General Purpose Database
Trust CockroachDB as the primary data store for even the most mundane apps and services
System of Record
Store and process mission-critical data with limitless scale, guaranteed uptime and correctness
Transactional Database
Manage transactional data and perform basic analytics in the database
Get started
There are many ways to get started with CockroachDB. You can download from our git repo and roll your own, or use one of the following to simplify your deployment. As always we are here to help in our public slack channel and in the community.
Kubernetes can run a database. The operator needs to understand it.
Kubernetes gives platform teams a standard way to schedule, deploy, and observe infrastructure. But a StatefulSet does not understand database health. It does not know when a node is safe to remove, how replicas should be placed across failure domains, or whether a version change can proceed without putting availability at risk.
That gap creates operational glue: custom scripts, manual sequencing, certificate workflows, upgrade runbooks, and knowledge held by a small number of specialists.
The CockroachDB Kubernetes Operator closes the gap between container orchestration and database operations. It uses CockroachDB-specific resources and database health signals to reconcile the state you declare with the state a production database needs.
Kubernetes manages the infrastructure: scheduling, RBAC, networking, storage, and observability integrations.
The operator manages the database lifecycle: initialization, topology, scaling, upgrades, certificates, and storage changes.
CockroachDB manages the data: replication, distribution, rebalancing, transactions, and recovery from node or zone failures.
Your team keeps the Kubernetes operating model. The database gets the context required to operate safely.