StatefulSets are usually the synonym for running stateful applications on Kubernetes. When you say that you run a database, storage, or messaging system on Kubernetes, people will automatically assume you use them. StatefulSets will manage the Pods for you, give you a stable identity, make it easy to handle persistent storage, and provide other basic building blocks for running stateful applications. But what about their limitations? What if you start outgrowing them? Is that even possible? This talk will share the experience from the Strimzi project of how we started to run into the limitations of what StatefulSets provide and how we eventually decided to leave them behind. But it will also share some of the challenges and pitfalls we faced, troubles we run into, and explain why leaving StatefulSets behind might not be for everyone.