Production multi-node SurrealDB uses SurrealDS for shared distributed storage — not TiKV. For managed HA on SurrealDS, use SurrealDB Cloud Scale. Self-hosted SurrealDS on Kubernetes is available with SurrealDB Enterprise.
For a single-node RocksDB deployment on Kubernetes (including a cluster you create with AKS), start with Deploy on Kubernetes. For a local open-source distributed-storage playground only, see Run a multi-node cluster.
What is AKS?
Azure Kubernetes Service is Microsoft Azure’s managed Kubernetes offering. Storage for SurrealDB is still your choice: single-node RocksDB on a persistent volume, or multi-node SurrealDS (Cloud Scale or Enterprise).
Choose a path
| Goal | Path |
|---|---|
| Managed multi-node HA (recommended for most teams) | SurrealDB Cloud Scale on SurrealDS — no TiKV or TiDB operator to run |
| Self-hosted multi-node HA on AKS | SurrealDB Enterprise with SurrealDS (operator and runbooks shipped with Enterprise) |
| Single SurrealDB pod, RocksDB on a volume | Deploy on Kubernetes on an AKS cluster you manage |
Local experiment with Community tikv:// | Run a multi-node cluster (not Cloud Scale / Enterprise storage) |
Why not TiKV for production HA
Older guides walked through the TiDB operator and a TiKV cluster as the shared store behind SurrealDB on AKS. That path is not the storage engine behind Cloud Scale or Enterprise SurrealDS deployments. Prefer SurrealDS for production HA; keep TiKV for local Community experimentation only.
Next steps
Deployment models — single-node vs multi-node vs Cloud
Observability once an instance is running