Gartner’s Container Best Practices suggest a platform strategy that considers security, governance, monitoring, storage, networking, container lifecycle management and orchestration like Kubernetes.
Building Secure and Efficient Kubernetes Clusters
This document outlines key considerations for architecting robust Kubernetes clusters, drawing on best practices from the industry.
Prioritizing Updates and Education
- Maintain Modern Infrastructure: Regularly update your Kubernetes version to benefit from security patches and performance improvements.
- Invest in Team Expertise: Equip developers and operations teams with the necessary skills to effectively manage Kubernetes environments.
Enhancing Security and Governance
- Secure Development Pipeline: Integrate automated image scanning throughout your CI/CD pipeline, identifying vulnerabilities during both build and runtime. Treat open-source code with caution, assuming potential security risks.
- Granular Access Control: Implement RBAC for the entire cluster, enforcing least privilege and zero-trust principles.
- Hardening Containers: Run containers with non-root users and leverage read-only file systems for additional security.
Crafting Efficient Configurations
- Minimize Defaults: Favor clear and concise configurations over default values. This reduces errors and improves maintainability.
- Build Lean Images: Start with minimal base images and build upon them with your specific code. Avoid bloated images from public repositories like Docker Hub. Smaller images translate to faster builds, reduced storage consumption, and quicker deployments.
- Focus on Single Processes: A container should ideally handle one specific process. This simplifies health checks for the orchestrator.
- Embrace Failure and Recovery: When a process fails, rely on Kubernetes to automatically restart the container. Avoid implementing custom failure retries within the container.
- Descriptive Labeling: Use meaningful labels to annotate your deployments, aiding both current and future developers in understanding your architecture.
Finding the Right Granularity
- Microservices Optimization: While microservices offer advantages, avoid excessive granularity. Not every function within a logical component requires its own dedicated microservice.
- Streamline Workflows: Implement an automated CI/CD pipeline to eliminate the need for manual Kubernetes deployments.
- Liveness and Readiness Probes: Utilize livenessProbes and readinessProbes to manage Pod lifecycles effectively. This prevents premature termination during initialization or user request routing before a Pod is fully ready.
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