Kubernetes in Production: Lessons Learned

Kubernetes is powerful but complex. After years of running production clusters, here are the lessons that matter most.

Start with managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS) — do not manage your own control plane. Use namespaces for environment isolation. Implement resource requests and limits on every pod.

Monitoring is non-negotiable: Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for dashboards, and PagerDuty for alerting. Use pod disruption budgets and horizontal pod autoscalers for reliability.