Setting up Production Specific Kubernetes Environment

19 August 2020

When you are managing microservices then its management and orchestration is kind of tricky for the team or person. For microservice based applications Kubernetes is the best choice. Once the microservice gets increased and its management and debugging issue on the fly is difficult for a single person or a team.

Complete Kubernetes infrastructure needs proper and detailed DNS, load balancing, Ingress and K8’s role-based access control then makes the deployment process quite daunting for teams. Once Kubernetes is deployed it comes with the multiple addition of monitoring and all the associated operations playbooks to fix problems as they occur — such as when running out of capacity, ensuring HA, backups, and more. Finally, the cycle repeats again, whenever there’s a new version of Kubernetes released by the community, and your production clusters need to be upgraded without risking any application downtime.

Bare-bone/custom configured Kubernetes is never enough for real-world production applications.

Here are few key services you need around bare-bone Kubernetes to enable mission-critical production use:

1.  Managed Kubernetes Service Ensures SLA and Simplifies Operations
2.  Cluster Monitoring and Logging
3.  Registry and Package Management — Helm
4.  Cluster Provisioning and Load Balancing
5.  Security

In production specific cluster monitoring the running application is one of the key things to resolve the issue or hot fixes. While deploying applications in a production environment try to avoid the simple deployment as per separate microservice. Create a deployable package with the help of Helm Package Manager and then deploy it on the Kubernetes cluster. Integrate Kubernetes with the Istio to establish and manage the mesh of multiple services and monitor service flows.

Take account for the cluster provisioning and load balancing. In a production specific environment high availability is a must as it should not have any downtime.