Production Best Practices
Best practice is not a fixed checklist. It is a way to turn risk into a platform contract: workloads must declare resources, security needs guardrails, observability must answer incident questions, and backup must prove it can restore real systems.
Baseline capabilities
| Capability | Minimum production bar |
|---|---|
| Scaling | Requests, HPA, cluster autoscaler, capacity buffer, load test evidence. |
| Security | RBAC, Pod Security, NetworkPolicy, admission policy, audit, secret lifecycle. |
| Monitoring | Metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alert routing, incident review. |
| Recovery | etcd backup, workload backup, restore drills, DR tests. |
Start here
- Scaling And Autoscaling
- Production Scaling Decision Guide
- Security Baseline
- Security Hardening Checklist
- Observability Baseline
- Backup And Disaster Recovery
Operating principle
Every baseline should be versioned, tested, and reviewed like product code. If a cluster setting can break availability or security, it should not live only in a dashboard click path.