Best Practices for Containers in Kubernetes

The container technology improved the way organizations maintain their application in production. This leads to mass adoption, and according to Gartner, organizations deploy 85% of their applications using containerized applications by 2025. In 2019, only 35% of the organizations used containerized applications.

With containers making their way into the organization, it is only time we will see many players providing the service. Kubernetes is one of those services that offer popular containerized service. However, the container ecosystem has a long way to go before it matures.

For companies, it is essential to use best practices to maximize the technology. And, that’s why, in this article, we will list the top practices for containers and Kubernetes in production. With a focus on different aspects of the containers and how companies can use the top practices for greater efficiency.

What are the Key Challenges Faced by Organizations?

When it comes to containers, organizations face many key challenges. It is important to understand the challenges before discussing the top practices for Containers and Kubernetes.

• Difficulty in determining the right time to start pilot projects. In addition, the lack of unclear ROI and DevOps culture can also hinder adoption.
• The operational complexity of the production deployments related to containers is still unknown and a concern for organizations. These concerns span over data management, monitoring, security, and networking.
• Infrastructure automation for cloud-native applications is challenging. The skills to manage complex automation are hard to find in enterprise settings.
• Not a clear approach for Kubernetes deployments operational model. This is because of unclear accountability matrices and responsibilities that span across infrastructure, developers, and other sections of the organizations.

Strategic Planning and Analysis

It is vital for an enterprise to strategic planning and analysis if they want to containers adoption. However, the lack of operational know-how, steep learning curve, and technological immaturity can pose challenges.

To overcome this, organizations need to do proper strategic planning and analysis. Initially, it is important to understand that it requires the right skill set to manage its steep learning curve. That’s why it is crucial to ask the right questions:

• Do you have appropriate candidates to manage the containerization workload?
• What workloads are you going to deploy? Also, what commercial Kubernetes distribution are you going to use for multi environments?
• Does your DevOps team understand the importance of the right platform strategy?
• Have you evaluated the ROI investment?
• What roles, training, and skills your team needs for a successful implementation?
• How will you approach platform integration?

Once done, you now need to select the Kubernetes platform. The choice depends on your technical and functional factors. As an organization, you can choose between three patterns:

• Public Cloud Container Services
• Upstream Version: Do it Yourself(DIY)
• Operations-Focused
• Container Management Software
• Developer Focused

Top Practices for Containers, Kubernetes

With the key challenges discussed, it is now time to check out the top practices for containers and Kubernetes.

Observability and Monitoring

The developer team needs to focus on the functional aspects for monitoring and have a more detailed look at the service or container level. In traditional settings, developers focus on host-level metrics, including input-output(I/O), CPU utilization, and memory utilization.

To overcome a limited approach, the team can work on the following recommendations:

• Monitor container at a more granular or service level.
• Work with vendors and tools that offer proper integration to Kubernetes.
• Use tools with distributed tracing, rich application monitoring, and Prometheus integration.

Governance and Security

It is critical to take security seriously before it is too late. In Kubernetes and containers, the entire life cycle of the containerized environment needs to be secured.

The key security and governance practices include:

• Use signing and image screening process to ward off vulnerabilities during the continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD) process. This protects the overall containerized ecosystem throughout its lifecycle.
• Use access controls to improve sensitive data access. SSL can help to improve data security.
• Center for Internet Security(CIS) benchmarks must be run after setting up configuration. The benchmarks are available in Kubernetes and provide great security from the onset.
• Setup proper malicious activity monitor.

Storage

Storage across containers requires a special approach for consistency and protection. Customers want their data accessible everywhere. In fact, customers do not care about what technology you are using. As an organization, you need to work out the challenges while working with legacy applications. When shifting to container technology, many organizations refactor their applications that means the application may require a new storage platform to ensure performance, agility, and availability.

The best practices to handle storage requirements are:

• The top practice to select storage solutions is to ensure that the application microservices architecture principles match. The storage solution also needs to work efficiently with container-native data services and should be API-driven for best integration.
• The storage also needs to integrate well with the Kubernetes distribution while supporting container storage interfaces.

Networking

Just like other application components, networking also needs to be managed correctly. This is because of portability and agility — as without portability, the team will struggle to work from different working environments, including the production. Networking practices also determine how well the agility of the project works. So, the top practices to manage networking for containers and Kubernetes include:

• Ensure Kubernetes support software-defined networking(SDN). If SDN is not supported, make sure to choose the right container networking interface(CNI). The CNI should provide a policy enforcement engine and network overlay.
• Provide training to network engineers about Linux networking. The engineers should also learn about network automation tools.
• The Kubernetes distribution should handle load balancing using ingress controller support.

DevOps Toolchain and Kubernetes Integrate

DevOps is at the core of the modern development environment. To ensure optimal efficiency and effectiveness, the Kubernetes distribution should work with DevOps. This way, the DevOps team can work with infrastructure-as-code(IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and other automation tools.

The best recommendations for approaching Kubernetes integration with DevOps include:

• Infrastructure automation tools should work with infrastructure provisioning and management.
• CI/CD tools need to be integrated with the Kubernetes platform.

Final Thoughts

Containerization technology is slowly picking up the pace. It is now up to organizations to adopt the best practices and take steps to ensure optimal implementation. This post tries to showcase the best practices for Containers and Kubernetes. So, what do you think about it? Comment below and let us know.

   

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