In Kubernetes, having a centralized logging, monitoring, and alerting system is critical. With many services in play, you can’t just log into a server to view log files each time you need to troubleshoot an issue. To achieve this, you’ll have to consider additional tools and need to configure them to work with your Kubernetes cluster.

One benefit of Kubernetes is that it recovers from crashes. If for whatever reason pods crash, Kubernetes will automatically restart them. This capability is great for end-users, but you still need a way to monitor these issues and, ideally, prevent them in the future.

A major benefit of containerization is the ability to efficiently use computing power. To use this capability, you need to know how to configure Kubernetes to request resources on each pod. If you skip this step, you’ll put your application at risk of crashing because its containers failed to source enough memory or processing power. That will leave you with downtime and, potentially, dissatisfied end-users/customers, and a loss of revenue.

The first challenge with Kubernetes is your most important objective: to get a working application live on the internet. Yes, you can expose your application using node ports or load balancers. But if you require a more complex production-ready setup, you would install and configure an ingress controller on Kubernetes, automatically create hostnames in DNS, create SSL/TLS certificates, implement network policies, use an OAuth2 proxy for SSO, or even add mTLS between Pods. These are just a few examples of the enormous complexity introduced by Kubernetes.

We know DevOps teams like to select and integrate all the tools themselves and integrate them, but is your product owner willing to wait for months before your application is up and running and securely exposed?

Security is a vital aspect of any DevOps team. Implementing all the required (ISO 27001) security controls can be difficult and time-consuming. Let’s look at some security controls that would require your attention:

• Identify vulnerabilities within container images and running containers, and see whether they are fixable or not
• Isolate sensitive workloads
• Implement network policies to control traffic
• Implement secrets management
• Assess image provenance, including registries
• Enforcement of policies
• RBAC configuration

Otomi offers an out-of-the-box enterprise-grade and production-ready platform for Kubernetes and offers a suite of highly integrated and pre-configured industry-leading open source applications, combined with automation and self-service.

Immediately overcome all the challenges DevOps teams face when deploying and managing applications on Kubernetes. DevOps teams will get access to all the tools they need, can configure alerts to be sent, configure resource constraints using a simple UI, expose applications securely (with mTLS) in just a couple of minutes and take advantage of all the security features including policy enforcement, image vulnerability scanning, and workload isolation. Get full control over the complete stack and start deploy, operate and monitor your apps today!