Kubernetes in Production: Best Practices for 2024

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, but running it in production requires careful planning. Based on our experience managing 50+ Kubernetes clusters, here are the essential practices that prevent common issues.

Production Kubernetes Best Practices

Resource management is critical. We always set CPU and memory requests and limits for every pod. Without limits, a misbehaving pod can consume all resources and crash the node. We use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) to automatically scale based on CPU/memory usage, and Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) to right-size pod resources over time.

Security should be built in from the start. We enable Pod Security Standards, use network policies to restrict pod-to-pod communication, and implement RBAC with least privilege principles. All container images are scanned for vulnerabilities before deployment, and we use admission controllers to enforce policies.

Monitoring and observability are non-negotiable. We deploy Prometheus for metrics collection, Grafana for visualization, and ELK stack for log aggregation. Distributed tracing helps debug issues across microservices. We also set up alerts for critical metrics like pod restarts, node failures, and resource exhaustion.

Teams following these practices typically see: