Kubernetes
Kubernetes is the industry-standard container orchestration platform, automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. With deep Kubernetes expertise, I architect and operate production-grade clusters for high-availability, scalable applications.
Overview
Kubernetes, originally developed by Google and open-sourced in 2014, has become the de facto standard for container orchestration. Based on Google's experience running billions of containers, Kubernetes provides a robust platform for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. Major companies like Spotify, Airbnb, and The New York Times run production workloads on Kubernetes.
My Kubernetes Experience
I have designed and operated production Kubernetes clusters on AWS (EKS), GCP (GKE), and Azure (AKS), implemented GitOps workflows with ArgoCD and Flux, configured observability with Prometheus and Grafana, managed multi-tenant clusters, and architected high-availability applications with proper resource management and autoscaling.
Cluster Operations
Deployed and managed EKS, GKE, and AKS clusters with node autoscaling and multiple node pools. Configured cluster networking with Calico and Cilium. Implemented RBAC for security and multi-tenancy. Managed cluster upgrades with zero downtime. Configured monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, and cloud-native tools.
Application Deployment
Designed Helm charts for application packaging and versioning. Implemented GitOps with ArgoCD for declarative deployment. Configured horizontal pod autoscaling based on CPU, memory, and custom metrics. Implemented ingress controllers (NGINX, Traefik) with SSL/TLS termination. Created deployment strategies including blue-green and canary deployments.
Production Reliability
Configured pod disruption budgets for high availability during maintenance. Implemented proper resource requests and limits for QoS. Set up persistent volumes with StatefulSets for databases. Configured liveness and readiness probes. Implemented network policies for security. Used Pod Security Standards for workload isolation.
Key Strengths
Kubernetes strengths include automated container orchestration, self-healing capabilities, declarative configuration, horizontal scalability, multi-cloud portability, extensive ecosystem (CNCF projects), strong community support, and enterprise adoption with managed services (EKS, GKE, AKS).
Architecture Patterns
Common Kubernetes patterns include microservices with service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), stateless applications with Deployments, stateful applications with StatefulSets, batch jobs with Jobs and CronJobs, DaemonSets for node-level services, operators for application-specific automation, and GitOps for declarative deployment.
Use Cases
Kubernetes is ideal for microservices architectures, cloud-native applications, multi-cloud deployments, hybrid cloud environments, CI/CD platforms, machine learning workloads, batch processing, and applications requiring high availability and scalability.