Kubernetes

Kubernetes is our orchestration layer for running, scaling, and operating containerized workloads in resilient environments.

What it is

Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that manages workload scheduling, scaling, service discovery, and runtime health.

Best practices

Why we use it

• Standardized deployment and scaling patterns.
• Built-in primitives for availability and rollout safety.
• Strong ecosystem for observability and operations.

Setup in this repo

• Define manifests/Helm values per environment with clear ownership.
• Keep config, secrets, and runtime resources separated.
• Standardize namespace and labeling conventions.

Team conventions

• Always define resource requests/limits.
• Use readiness/liveness probes on services.
• Use rolling updates with safe disruption policies.
• Keep deployment config versioned with application changes.

Error handling and reliability

• Fail fast with probe-driven health signaling.
• Use retries/timeouts/circuit controls at application and ingress layers.
• Keep rollback strategy explicit for deployment failures.

Testing and validation

• Validate manifests before apply (schema/lint checks).
• Test rollout and rollback in pre-production environments.
• Verify autoscaling and disruption behavior for critical workloads.

Abstractions and anti-patterns

• Avoid shipping defaults without production-safe resource settings.
• Avoid unbounded horizontal scaling without backend capacity checks.
• Avoid manual one-off cluster changes outside version control.

Example

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: api
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: api
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: api
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: api
          image: ghcr.io/example/api:latest
          ports:
            - containerPort: 3000

Common pitfalls

• Missing probes and resource limits.
• Configuration drift from manual cluster edits.
• Overly permissive RBAC policies.
• Rollouts without clear rollback paths.

References

Internal

• DevOps Stack
• Docker
• GitHub Actions

External

• Kubernetes Documentation
• Kubernetes Concepts
• Production Best Practices