Well with k8s 1.10+ it's also possible to use statefulsets and local volume, so with affinity it's possible to just use k8s as an orchestration system where you "install" your database and keep it up to date with k8s. of course if a node goes down you need to failover, etc. but patroni/zalando postgres works really well with statefulsets and local volume. (as long as a single node is still running, which should always be the case...)
(https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/04/13/local-persistent-volum...)
I want to note that this has actually been possible since like k8s 1.7, you can just start a DB with node affinity and use hostPath volumes.
That's what I was doing until rook came around. If you're running in something like AWS (or even if you're not), you can also do something like attach an EBS volume (to a local host) and do that. Or, you can set up a plain ISCSI drive (or get one from your provider, even basic providers these days might offer storage that way) and use that.
