Kubernetes: From Zero to Production

Why Kubernetes?

When your application grows beyond a handful of containers, you need orchestration. Kubernetes handles scheduling, scaling, self-healing, and service discovery — the operational complexity that would otherwise consume your team.

Cluster Setup

For production, avoid managed solutions until you understand the fundamentals. Start with kubeadm on three nodes:

kubeadm init --pod-network-cidr=10.244.0.0/16
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flannel-io/flannel/master/Documentation/kube-flannel.yml

The Core Abstractions

• Pod — The smallest deployable unit. Usually one container, sometimes sidecars.
• Deployment — Manages replica sets and rolling updates.
• Service — Stable networking endpoint for a set of pods.
• Ingress — HTTP routing from the outside world into your cluster.

Production Checklist

1. Resource limits on every container
2. Liveness and readiness probes
3. Pod disruption budgets for high availability
4. Network policies to restrict pod-to-pod traffic
5. Secrets management with external-secrets or sealed-secrets

Monitoring Stack

Deploy Prometheus + Grafana for metrics, and Loki for logs. The kube-prometheus-stack Helm chart gets you 80% of the way there in one command.

CI/CD Integration

Use ArgoCD for GitOps-style deployments. Push a manifest change to your repo, ArgoCD syncs it to the cluster. No more kubectl apply from laptops.