Kubernetes Consulting

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform originally developed at Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and operation of containerized applications across clusters. It provides a declarative API and controllers to manage workloads and infrastructure, supporting common patterns such as stateless services (Deployments), stateful applications (StatefulSets with PersistentVolumes), node-level agents (DaemonSets), and batch/periodic processing (Jobs and CronJobs). Kubernetes also includes primitives for service discovery and traffic management (Services, Ingress), configuration and sensitive data handling (ConfigMaps, Secrets), rolling updates and rollbacks, health checks, self-healing, and horizontal scaling, making it a standard platform for running applications consistently across on-premises and cloud environments.

There are many advantages to using Orchestration tools:

• Improve the utilization of CPU, memory, and storage usage by running many processes on a single machine
• Manage the entire lifecycle of the orchestrated workloads: pre & post initialization & termination
• Control the scale of workloads and the scale of their underlying infrastructure separately
• Centralized management of workloads and infrastructure

Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform used to run containerized applications reliably across clusters. It standardizes deployment and operations workflows, making it a common choice for scalable, multi-service systems.

• Declarative deployments and desired state management, enabling repeatable releases and automated reconciliation when reality drifts from configuration.
• Horizontal and vertical scaling, supporting manual scaling as well as autoscaling based on resource metrics and demand.
• High availability primitives, distributing replicas across nodes and zones to reduce single points of failure.
• Self-healing behavior, restarting unhealthy containers and rescheduling workloads when nodes fail.
• Rolling updates and rollbacks, allowing controlled, incremental changes with the ability to revert to a known-good version.
• Service discovery and internal load balancing, providing stable service endpoints and routing traffic to healthy pods.
• Ingress and traffic management integration, enabling HTTP routing, TLS termination, and policy-driven exposure of services.
• ConfigMaps and Secrets, separating configuration and sensitive values from images to support safer, environment-specific deployments.
• Storage orchestration via CSI, attaching persistent volumes across cloud and on-prem backends for stateful workloads.
• Extensibility through CRDs and operators, enabling platform teams to automate domain-specific operational tasks.

Kubernetes is best suited for organizations running multiple services that need consistent deployment, scaling, and reliability across environments. The main trade-offs are operational complexity and the need for strong cluster governance, observability, and security practices.

Common alternatives include HashiCorp Nomad, AWS ECS, and GCP Cloud Run, which can be simpler for single-cloud or fully managed use cases but typically offer less portability and ecosystem breadth.

Our experience with Kubernetes has helped us build the practical knowledge, patterns, and tooling needed to support clients running containerized workloads reliably in production.

Some of the things we did include:

• Provisioned and upgraded Kubernetes clusters across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-prem environments using Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform and Pulumi
• Standardized application delivery with Helm charts and GitOps workflows using Argo CD, including multi-environment promotion and rollback strategies
• Implemented autoscaling for both clusters and workloads (HPA/VPA and node scaling), tuning requests/limits to improve stability and reduce cost
• Built observability stacks for metrics, logs, and alerts using Prometheus and Grafana, with actionable SLO-driven dashboards
• Hardened clusters with RBAC, network policies, secret management, image scanning, and admission controls to reduce operational and security risk
• Designed high-availability and disaster recovery setups, including multi-zone clusters, backup/restore for stateful workloads, and tested failover procedures
• Migrated legacy services into Kubernetes with minimal downtime, breaking monoliths into deployable components and establishing safe rollout patterns
• Implemented service-to-service traffic management and mTLS in multi-cluster environments using service mesh tooling such as Istio
• Optimized cluster performance by tuning ingress, resource quotas, pod disruption budgets, and scheduling constraints for predictable deployments
• Created runbooks, operational playbooks, and enablement sessions so internal teams could confidently operate Kubernetes day-to-day

This hands-on experience across different infrastructures and workload types helped us accumulate deep Kubernetes expertise and deliver secure, scalable, and maintainable cluster setups that teams can operate with confidence.

Some of the things we can help you do with Kubernetes include:

• Assess your current Kubernetes platform and deliver a state report covering cost/utilization, reliability, security posture, and operational risks.
• Create a practical adoption roadmap with prioritized improvements, effort estimates, and an implementation plan.
• Provision and standardize clusters using Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform or Pulumi for repeatable, auditable environments.
• Implement deployment workflows with Helm and GitOps using ArgoCD to improve release consistency and reduce manual changes.
• Harden clusters with security guardrails, RBAC, network policies, secrets management, and compliance-ready controls.
• Set up observability for clusters and workloads (metrics, logs, and alerts) to speed up troubleshooting and reduce downtime.
• Optimize cost and performance through right-sizing and autoscaling with Cluster Autoscaler, Karpenter, KEDA, HPA, and VPA.
• Improve resiliency with high-availability designs, backup/restore strategies, and disaster recovery runbooks.
• Operate and continuously improve Kubernetes day-to-day, including upgrades, deprecations, incident response, and workload lifecycle management.
• Enable your team with hands-on training, documentation, and best-practice playbooks to run Kubernetes confidently.