33 posts tagged with "Kubernetes"

It is Friday afternoon. You deploy a new version of the payment service. The rollout stalls. Pods are stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. The previous version is still serving traffic (thanks to rolling updates), but if you do not fix this soon, the old ReplicaSet will scale down and you have an outage. You need a systematic approach, not a panicked kubectl delete pod loop.

Here is a scenario that happens far too often: a developer deploys a container that runs as root, mounts the host filesystem, and has no network restrictions. An attacker exploits a vulnerability in the application, escapes the container, and now has root access to the node — and from there, to the entire cluster. Kubernetes gives you powerful security primitives, but none of them are enabled by default.

A pod crashes at 3 AM, restarts, and by the time you check in the morning, kubectl logs shows only the current container's output — the crash logs are gone forever. Kubernetes does not persist logs beyond the lifetime of a container, and on a busy cluster, even node-level logs rotate away within hours. If you are not shipping logs to a central store, you are debugging with one eye closed.

Your cluster is running thirty microservices, and one of them is silently eating all the memory on node-3. By the time someone notices, the node is in NotReady state and pods are getting evicted left and right. Without proper monitoring, you are flying blind in production — and Kubernetes gives you zero visibility out of the box.

Your application handles 100 requests per second during the day and 10,000 during flash sales. Running enough pods for peak traffic wastes money 95% of the time. Running too few means your app crashes when traffic spikes. Autoscaling solves this by matching your pod count and resource allocation to actual demand in real time.

Deployments are the workhorse of Kubernetes, but not every workload is a long-running web server. You need to run a database migration once, process a queue of images every night, collect logs from every node, or deploy a database cluster with stable identities. Kubernetes has a dedicated workload type for each of these patterns.