Production Readiness Checklist and Best Practices for Kubernetes Environments
Co-Author: Jagdish Komakula
Kubernetes is a stepping stone for the organization’s Cloud Native journey. Building a highly available, scalable, resilient, and secured Kubernetes environment with common services such as resource management, monitoring, logging, and alerting would be the primary focus for Kubernetes administrators and DevOps Architects.
This would require a comprehensive checklist comprising Infrastructure and Application workload aspects. This checklist provides best practices for deploying available, secure, scalable, and resilient services on Kubernetes.
This checklist covers Kubernetes and Dev-Ops aspects in detail. Your deployments are fine with pods and services but to make it as a complete Cloud Native app, you may need to consider a few more points from the list.
Broadly there are two categories for production readiness.
1: Infrastructure level checklist
2: Application /Workload level checklist
1: Infrastructure level checklist
This checklist covers various aspects of Kubernetes deployment such as Deployment of nodes, namespaces, assign resources and security, create Monitoring and logging framework, etc.
2: Application /Workload level checklist
This checklist covers various aspects of Container development and deployments such as Build / deploy of application builds, use of config maps, security, and labels, create fault tolerance and expose metrics.
Conclusion
The checklists mentioned above are purely based on multiple customer engagements and best practices implemented over the years.These checklists would help in getting your cloud native applications to production using any Kubernetes based environements. There may be other things based on your cloud solution which are not covered in this list.Feel free to download these checklists and modify based on your production requirements and deployed environment.
