Kubernetes Best Practices in 2025

Kubernetes has matured significantly. Here are the best practices that reflect current learnings and capabilities.

Platform Considerations

Managed vs. Self-Managed

Use managed Kubernetes:
• EKS, GKE, AKS
• Reduced operational burden
• Automatic upgrades
• Integrated tooling

Self-manage only when:
• Specific compliance needs
• Cost optimization at scale
• Special requirements

Multi-Cluster Strategy

Why multiple clusters:
• Environment isolation
• Regional deployment
• Blast radius limitation
• Team separation

Management tools:
• Fleet management
• GitOps across clusters
• Service mesh federation

Resource Management

Right-Sizing

Set appropriate limits:

resources:
  requests:
    memory: "256Mi"
    cpu: "100m"
  limits:
    memory: "512Mi"
    cpu: "500m"

Best practices:
• Start conservative
• Monitor actual usage
• Use VPA recommendations
• Regular right-sizing reviews

Autoscaling

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler:

apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
spec:
  minReplicas: 2
  maxReplicas: 10
  metrics:
  - type: Resource
    resource:
      name: cpu
      target:
        type: Utilization
        averageUtilization: 70

KEDA for event-driven:
• Queue-based scaling
• Custom metrics
• Scale to zero

Security

Pod Security Standards

Enforce restricted profile:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  labels:
    pod-security.kubernetes.io/enforce: restricted

Network Policies

Default deny:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: default-deny
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress
  - Egress

Secrets Management

External secrets:
• AWS Secrets Manager
• HashiCorp Vault
• External Secrets Operator

Never store secrets in Git.

Deployment Patterns

GitOps

Standard approach:
• Declarative configs in Git
• ArgoCD or Flux
• Automated sync
• Drift detection

Progressive Delivery

Argo Rollouts:
• Canary deployments
• Blue-green deployments
• Automatic rollbacks
• Analysis runs

Observability

The Three Pillars

Metrics:
• Prometheus
• Grafana dashboards
• Custom metrics
• Alerting

Logs:
• Structured logging
• Central aggregation
• Log-based alerts
• Retention policies

Traces:
• OpenTelemetry
• Distributed tracing
• Service maps
• Latency analysis

SLO-Based Monitoring

Define and track:
• Availability targets
• Latency objectives
• Error budgets
• Burn rate alerts

Cost Optimization

Strategies

Cost Visibility

Tools:
• Kubecost
• OpenCost
• Cloud provider tools

Common Pitfalls

Avoid

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