Kubernetes in Production: Lessons Learned
Kubernetes has become the backbone of many production apps. After years running pods in production, a few patterns separate smooth rollouts from outages. The goal is boring, reliable operations that scale with demand and handle failure gracefully.
Observability and alerts Observability is the first line of defense on a busy cluster. Define clear SLOs for core services, collect metrics, logs, and traces, and keep dashboards focused. Prefer Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for dashboards, and OpenTelemetry for traces. Centralized logs with Loki help you diagnose incidents quickly. Treat alerting as a product: each alert should have a useful owner, a documented runbook, and a defined remediation time.
Deployment strategies Release plans matter as soon as you go beyond a single pod. Use canaries or blue–green deployments to test in production with small risk. Pair this with readiness and liveness probes, and automate rollback if a threshold is crossed. Monitor traffic, error rates, and latency during the rollout, and keep a backout plan handy.
Security and governance Security in Kubernetes is a mindset and a process. Enforce least privilege with RBAC, isolate workloads with namespaces, and restrict cross-namespace access. Limit network egress where possible and use Network Policies. Scan images for known flaws, pin dependencies, and store secrets in a managed vault or secret store rather than in configs.
Maintenance and upgrades Regular maintenance keeps a cluster healthy. Schedule upgrades during low-traffic windows, drain nodes, and perform rolling updates to avoid downtime. Test upgrades in staging that mirrors production, and validate backup/restore procedures. Have a well-documented runbook and a rollback path if things go wrong.
Incident response and recovery Incident response is a team sport. Predefine runbooks for common failures, assign roles, and run quarterly drills. Focus on rapid containment, clear communication, and fast restoration. After incidents, do a postmortem, share findings, and update automation and alerts.
Conclusion With observability, careful rollout planning, and disciplined maintenance, Kubernetes grows with you instead of breaking. The pattern is learnable, not magical.
Key Takeaways
- Define SLOs and own alerts; keep them actionable and tied to business impact
- Use progressive deployment and automation for releases to reduce risk
- Maintain security, backups, and runbooks as living practices