Chapter 10: Operating and Maintaining Efficient Kubernetes Clusters

In previous chapters, we learned about production best practices for automating Kubernetes and its infrastructure components. We discussed challenges with provisioning stateless workloads in our clusters, including getting persistent storage up and running, choosing container images, and deployment strategies. We also learned about important observability tools in the ecosystem and building monitoring and logging stacks in our cluster to provide a solid base for our troubleshooting needs. Once we have a production-ready cluster and have started to serve workloads, it is vital to have efficient operations to oversee the cluster maintenance, availability, and other service-level objectives (SLOs).

In this chapter, we will focus on Kubernetes operation best practices and cover topics related to cluster maintenance, such as upgrades and rotation, backups, disaster recovery and avoidance, cluster and troubleshooting...