For enterprises of all shapes and sizes, Kubernetes has become a go-to-choice for shipping software and improving delivery time, visibility, and control of CI/CD workflows. But integrating enterprise-grade Kubernetes management practices that cover your entire pipeline – from code to cloud – can be challenging. Critical requirements demand best practices for K8s to meet those requirements. These critical items will span four key topic areas – source code, CI/CD integration, Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management, and workload administration. Let’s get started!

Source Code

When it comes to source code, it all starts with using Git-based workflows for automated software delivery and declarative infrastructure with tracking and to support rollbacks when there are failures. It is a best practice to keep secrets encrypted and outside the container. Implementing internal training and awareness programs is the best way to ensure this is happening is relatively simple. By ensuring this is a best practice for your organization and becomes a routine part of the development process, you avoid exposing them during a CI/CD deployment. Similarly, it is essential to ensure that application secrets are not embedded into your Helm charts or Kubernetes YAML files.