Nessie was medium-priority (600000); Trino coordinators were high-priority (1000000). The scheduler killed Nessie to place them. PDB is best-effort. Stock Nessie 0.103.3 could not set a PriorityClass. That is why the chart patch exists.
Iceberg needs a catalog; in-cluster MySQL had no TLS, no HA, and no backup. RocksDB is single-node, DocumentDB is not Mongo; we kept JDBC2, required TLS, and left the PVC until Aurora was trusted.
First query path on an EKS cluster that already existed: Nessie + one Trino, JDBC2 on a PVC, CDK for the bucket, Helmfile for the two charts. It worked. No TLS, no HA, no Spark, no Argo jobs, no dbt.