Introduction
Every app needs a database, most need a cache, and many need a queue. On a hosted PaaS each of those is a priced add-on. In Squark, they’re Marketplace deployments — one click, running in your own cluster.
How it works
Marketplace apps are curated helm charts — Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Grafana, Prometheus, and more — tuned with production defaults and deployed into your VPC.
Squark manages the lifecycle: install, upgrade, credential rotation, uninstall. Connection details are exposed to your applications as managed secrets, so wiring an app to its database is configuration, not plumbing.
Why in-cluster beats add-on
Latency: your cache is milliseconds from your app, not across a peering link. Cost: you pay for the nodes it runs on, not a tier. Compliance: data never leaves your account, which turns security reviews from negotiations into checkboxes.
And because add-ons are first-class workloads, Pulse watches them too — an unhealthy Kafka broker shows up in investigations with the same evidence trail as your own services.
The takeaway
The stack around your app is part of your app. It should live where your app lives — in your cloud.
Written by
Arjun Mehta
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