About managing stateful services
This topic provides recommendations for managing stateful services that you install into existing clusters.
Replicated KOTS is available only for existing customers. For supporting installations into customer managed clusters, we recommend Helm. For more information, see About Helm Installations with Replicated.
KOTS is a Generally Available (GA) product for existing customers. For more information about the Replicated product lifecycle phases, see Support Lifecycle Policy.
Preflight checks for stateful services
If you expect to also install stateful services into existing clusters, you will likely want to expose preflight analyzers that check for the existence of a storage class.
If you are allowing end users to provide connection details for external databases, you can often use a troubleshoot.sh built-in collector and analyzer to validate the connection details for Postgres, Redis, and many other common datastores. These can be included in both Preflight and SupportBundle specifications.
About adding persistent datastores
You can integrate persistent stores, such as databases, queues, and caches. There are options to give an end user, such as embedding an instance alongside the application or connecting an application to an external instance that they will manage.
For an example of integrating persistent datastores, see Example: Adding Database Configuration Options.