OpenClaw hit 250K GitHub stars, and naturally everyone wants to run it on Kubernetes. Makes sense. But there is a catch most guides skip: OpenClaw is a stateful, single-instance application. Run two replicas and you get duplicate bot messages, broken WebSocket connections, and corrupted state.
I compared three Helm chart options and broke down what actually matters: security defaults (93.4% of exposed instances had auth bypass), WebSocket timeout configs that silently break after 60 seconds, and real cost numbers (EKS at $152/mo vs k3s on a VPS for $15/mo).
If you are running OpenClaw for a small team, Kubernetes is probably overkill. Docker Compose or managed hosting gets you there faster. But if your org requires K8s, this guide covers the pitfalls.
https://clawhosters.com/blog/posts/deploy-openclaw-kubernetes-helm
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