Decision record
Where the obvious criterion lost
Anchor Cooperative was the case where “financial platform” did not automatically mean “put everything on Kubernetes”. A small team needed low operational overhead, so the web application went to Vercel and the containerised API to Render. But the financial source of truth went to managed AWS PostgreSQL from day one, because application compute is replaceable and financial data is not. EKS remains the target only when measured transaction volume, availability, operational complexity or regulation justifies owning the whole application tier. Operability won for stateless compute; durability and regulatory control won for the data layer.