Production Best Practices
Introduction
After years of running Kubernetes in production, I've learned that the difference between a demo cluster and a production-ready cluster is vast. I've experienced the pain of outages caused by missing resource limits, security breaches from misconfigured RBAC, and performance degradation from poorly optimized workloads. Each incident taught me valuable lessons about what it truly takes to run Kubernetes reliably at scale.
Throughout my career, I've helped organizations transition from experimental Kubernetes deployments to production-grade platforms handling millions of requests. I've conducted post-mortems on major incidents, implemented comprehensive security frameworks, and designed disaster recovery strategies. This guide distills everything I've learned about Kubernetes production best practices into actionable recommendations.
Whether you're preparing for your first production deployment or optimizing an existing cluster, these practices will help you avoid common pitfalls and build a reliable, secure, and performant platform.
Table of Contents
Production Readiness Fundamentals
Production readiness means your cluster can handle real-world workloads reliably, securely, and efficiently. It's not just about getting your application running—it's about ensuring it stays running, performs well under load, recovers from failures, and can be maintained by your team.
The Production Mindset
The shift from development to production requires a fundamental change in mindset. In development, you optimize for iteration speed and flexibility. In production, you optimize for reliability, security, and observability. Every decision must consider failure scenarios, security implications, and operational complexity.
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