Kubernetes in Production: The Complete Readiness Checklist

Cluster Architecture

Production Kubernetes requires multi-node control planes (minimum 3 masters for HA), dedicated node pools for different workload types, and proper sizing. Separate system workloads from application workloads using node selectors and taints. Plan for at least 30% headroom above peak utilization for burst capacity and rolling updates.

• Control plane: 3+ master nodes across availability zones
• Worker nodes: Separate pools for stateless apps, stateful workloads, and batch jobs
• Networking: CNI plugin selected and tested (Calico, Cilium, or cloud-native)
• Storage: CSI drivers configured for persistent volume provisioning

Security Hardening

Default Kubernetes configurations are not production-secure. Implement Pod Security Standards (restricted profile), network policies that deny all traffic by default, RBAC with least-privilege service accounts, secrets management via external vaults (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and image scanning in CI/CD pipelines.

Observability Stack

You cannot operate what you cannot observe. Deploy a complete observability stack: Prometheus + Grafana for metrics, Loki or Elasticsearch for logs, Jaeger or Tempo for distributed tracing, and alerting rules for cluster health, pod restarts, resource pressure, and application SLOs.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Kubernetes is not immune to data loss. Implement Velero or similar tools for cluster state backup, ensure persistent volume snapshots are automated and tested, maintain GitOps repositories as the source of truth for all cluster configuration, and document (and regularly test) your recovery procedures.

Release Management

Production clusters need controlled deployment processes. Implement GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux, use canary or blue-green deployments for critical services, enforce resource requests/limits on all pods, and implement pod disruption budgets to maintain availability during updates.