Tennis Smith, October 21, 2021
Congratulations, after much pain and effort you finally have Kubernetes working. You may even have it working in production. But how do you know you’ve done everything right? How can you be sure your environment reflects best practices and is completely secure?
Here are just a few of the many questions to ask yourself to make sure you’re covering all of your bases.
Kubernetes assumes you can start application components in any order, which is difficult to test. In another example, you may not know what to set for application CPU and memory limits (or if you should set them at all).
It may take running the Vertical Pod Autoscaler with ‘recommendation’ mode enabled so you can get recommendations from the profiler. Or maybe you’d rather set values for everything via the LimitRange parameter on your namespaces.
Then, there’s the biggest worry of them all: Security.
Take ServiceAccount for example, by default it is auto-mounted into the file system of all Pods. Do you want that, or would you rather disable it and provide more granular policies? Similarly, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) rules are difficult to set up. What RBAC design philosophy should you implement? Will it work for all your users?
Where to begin if you want to ensure your implementation is a good one?
First you’ll need to do an analysis of all your YAML configuration files (as well as Dockerfiles). Look for things such as containers running in privileged mode or anti-affinity rules being set incorrectly (again, this is just a small sample of the possible things to consider)
Then, you’ll need to do lots of displays via kubectl to get dynamic information like node status and resource quotas. Lastly, query the logs for errors on nodes, the control plane and general auditing.
At each of the above steps, validate your findings with known best practices.
As early adopters of Kubernetes, and maintainers of kOps, we know all the places where Kubernetes implementation can fall down. On the strength of that knowledge, we’ve assembled a free 1-day assessment of your Kubernetes clusters to help you determine the relative robustness of your Kubernetes implementation.
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By working together, we can ensure you have the best possible Kubernetes configuration.
