We stopped hosting software
Feb 9, 2026You read it right. That’s the sentiment I keep hearing from companies around me - and especially from recent firsthand experience. Every time my team considers adding a database or a message queue, we ask ourselves: would it be better to manage a host at all?
Our web application uses Redis as an authentication session store. It has always been a low-load, low-memory service. When we migrated to Kubernetes in late 2024, we moved from a self-hosted, single-pod Redis running in Docker Swarm to Memorystore. Before that, we felt compelled to test even minor Redis releases. It was painful overall on Swarm, and for reasons I no longer fully recall - possibly related to health checks - the instance took around seven minutes to restart. The deploy engineer would visibly tremble every time the application was updated.
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