We all know, Kubernetes is hard! Here are some best practices to follow while using it in production. Following these should ensure more security & efficiency.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. No doubt, DevOps has come a long way! Platforms like Docker and Kubernetes have made companies ship their software faster than ever. With the ever-growing usage of containers to build and ship software, Kubernetes has gained colossal popularity among software enterprises as a defacto container orchestration tool. Kubernetes has excellent features that support scaling, zero-downtime deployments, service discovery, automatic rollout and rollback capabilities, etc. To manage your container deployment at scale, Kubernetes is a must. It enables flexible distribution of resources and workloads. No doubt, Kubernetes in production is a great solution, but it takes some time to set up this tool and be familiar with it. Since many companies want to use Kubernetes in production these days, it is essential to prioritize some best practices. In this article, we will be discussing some Kubernetes best practices in production. Kubernetes has a complex & steep learning curve, and it is loaded with feature-rich capabilities. Production operations should be handled with utmost care & priority. If you face a shortage of in-house talent, you can always outsource this to the KaaS providers to take care of all the best practices for you. But suppose you are managing Kubernetes in production by all yourself. In that case, it is very important to pay attention to the best practices and especially around observability, logging, cluster monitoring, and security configurations. As many of us know, running containers in production is not an easy thing. It requires a lot of effort and computing resources, etc. There are many orchestration platforms in the market, but Kubernetes has gained enormous traction and major cloud providers’ support. All in all – Kubernetes, containerization, and microservices are shiny things, but they introduce security challenges. Kubernetes pods can be quickly spun up across all infrastructure classes, leading to a lot more internal traffic between pods and hence pose a security concern. Also, the attack surface for Kubernetes is usually larger. You must consider that the highly dynamic and ephemeral environment of Kubernetes does not blend well with legacy security tools. You can read my other article on how hard Kubernetes is. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today. By 2025, more than 85% of global organizations will be driving containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 35% in 2019. Cloud-native applications require a high degree of infrastructure automation, DevOps, and specialized operations skills, which are tough to find in enterprise IT organizations. Developing a Kubernetes strategy that applies best practices across security, monitoring, networking, governance, storage, container life cycle management, and platform selection is a must. Let us see some Kubernetes production best practices. Running Kubernetes in production is not easy; there are several aspects that should be taken care of. It can be complicated to manage large and distributed systems, particularly when something goes wrong. To make sure app instances are working, it is crucial to set up Kubernetes health checks. Creating custom health checks allows you to tailor them to your environment and needs. Image credits: WeaveWorks Readiness probes are intended to let Kubernetes know if the app is ready yet to serve the traffic. Kubernetes will always make sure the readiness probe passes before allotting a service to send traffic to the Pod.
