Updated June 13, 2023
Introduction to Kubernetes best practices
The Kubernetes best practices are defined as it is the guidance for using Kubernetes in which it tells us to use namespaces so that we can manage the resources easily; also, it has readiness and live-ness probes for health checks which provide an easy way to check if the application instances are running or not. Furthermore, it has resource requests and limits for keeping control of the deployment for scalability. Finally, it also has the best practice that can discover if the services are running outside the cluster. The best practices also tell to use smaller container images to save storage space, which may get the image construction faster.
Kubernetes best practices overviews
Below is the best practice overview of Kubernetes:
1. Use the latest version
While constructing the cluster, we should have updated a new version of Kubernetes because that has new updates, supplementary features, and patches related to the issues in the old version, which that stays our cluster isolated from the vulnerabilities, as we have seen the old versions also do not get sufficient support from the provider hence it is finer to use the latest version of the Kubernetes.
2. Version control for configuration files
When developing any application, it is essential to have configuration files, also known as organization files. Hence, it is the best practice to keep our configuration file in a version control system in advance to go into the cluster because it has information that is related to deployment, services, and access; if we do this, then we can able to keep track on changes and implements in our cluster to keep cluster secure.
3. Use namespaces
If our Kubernetes cluster is large, then there is more than one team working on the same cluster then it is the best practice to keep using namespaces because that plays a major role in the arrangement of the Kubernetes cluster, which also provides security from the other teams when various teams working on the one cluster then we require different namespaces for different teams like development, testing, and production so that developer can access the namespaces of development teams only, this separation of the namespaces will help to overcomes the mistakes in other namespaces.
Example:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: development
namespace: development
labels:
image: development01
spec:
containers:
- name: development01
image: npiny4. Use labels
The labels in the Kubernetes cluster are the set of basic values which is helpful to arrange the resources of the cluster, which has components like services, pods, containers, and networks, etc.; for example, if we have one application and two instances with the same name running on it and that can be used by different teams, e.g., development team and testing team in which this separation will help to differentiate the names of them.
Example:
apiVersion: v2
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: dev-pod
labels:
environment: operations
team: dev01
spec:
containers:
- name: dev01
image: "Wavnhu"
resources:
limits:
cpu: 15. Readiness and liveness probes
These two probes are used to check the health. Which readiness probe helps ensure that the pods are running previously to get controlled to that pod. It will take requests from the service if the pod is not prepared. The liveness probe is used to verify whether the application is running; it works by pinging the pod in response, and then it checks the health; if there is no response, the application will not run on the pod. If it fails, this probe will get going with a new pod.
Example:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: proContainer
spec:
containers:
- image: nypikx
name: proContainer
livenessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /prodhealth
port: 80806. Security using RBAC and firewall
The RBAC is the role-based access control where the role can provide permission to use the services. Due to that, we can give one role to various people with multiple permissions; per the security purpose, it is the best practice to use RBAC and a firewall because now a day everything is going hacked by hackers to get access into the system for spoiling it, hence we must have the cluster is more secure is necessary, it also provides settings for namespaces so that we can able to allow the user to get access in the assigned namespace only and to conveying with the server through the internet we can create the firewall to provide the security in an authorized network.
Example of RBAC policy:
apiVersion: rbac.authorization/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
name: read
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
resources: ["pods"]
verbs: ["get", "list"]7. Set resource requests and limits
If we have limited resources, the deployment to a production cluster may fail, which can happen with Kubernetes, so it is the best practice to set the resource request and limits in Kubernetes. Without them, the cluster will get utilizing the resources, the resource requests state the least amount of resources a container can use, and the resource limits can identify the greatest amount of resources a container can use, in which it is difficult to define the memory in megabytes or mebibytes.
Example:
containers:
- name: devContainer2
image: ubuntu
resources:
requests:
memory: "128Mi"
cpu: "400m"
limits:
memory: "256Mi"
cpu: "800m"8. Use a smaller container image
This is also a best practice to use a smaller container image because that may take less storage space, which will help to construct the image faster. also if we have a smaller docker image, there is no chance of security issues. Using the smaller container images is helpful, we can also use images 10 times smaller than the base image.
Conclusion
In this article, we conclude that there are some best practices for Kubernetes which tell us which version we can use, how the labels can work, how the readiness and liveness probes work, we have seen that how to set resource requests and limits, and also we can provide security through firewall and RBAC.
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