Charts and Kubernetes
Cloud-native delivery patterns for blockchain and platform workloads.
Kubernetes is useful when a workload benefits from declarative delivery, controlled rollout, self-healing, and integration with a broader platform. It is not automatically the right answer for every blockchain node.
A practical Agave chart can use separate StatefulSets for bootstrap and follower validators, per-node ReadWriteOnce PVCs, node selectors, host networking, optional QUIC NodePort Services, ingress for RPC/WebSocket/gRPC, and a separate faucet Deployment. These choices require the health, key-custody, networking, and shutdown controls documented below; a Helm chart is not itself an operational guarantee.
Keep metrics collection separate from validator workloads so it can be deployed and scaled independently. Review its RPC endpoint, validator identities, and collector configuration as environment-specific inputs.
What matters for blockchain workloads
- Stateful identity and durable storage.
- Scheduling onto the right hardware and local disks.
- Network behavior appropriate to the protocol.
- Graceful shutdown and recovery periods.
- Health checks that reflect chain state, not only whether a process has a TCP port open.
The Solana on Kubernetes page covers these trade-offs in detail for an especially demanding workload.