Chapter Fourteen
Best Practices and Anti-Patterns
The cross-cutting practices that separate a demo cluster from one you can trust — production readiness, security, cost and efficiency, reliability and SRE, and the anti-patterns to avoid.
The same mistakes show up across every kind of Kubernetes workload, and so do the same good habits. This final chapter collects them.
It is a set of checklists more than a narrative: what 'production-ready' actually requires, the security baseline, the cost and reliability practices that compound over time, and a catalog of the anti-patterns worth recognizing before they cost you an incident.
Topics in This Chapter
Topic 66
Production-Readiness Checklist
The concrete gates before a workload goes live — probes, limits, budgets, security context, observability — in one list.
Topic 67
Security Best Practices
The baseline that closes the common holes — least-privilege RBAC, restricted Pods, network policy, signed images, encrypted secrets.
Topic 68
Cost and Efficiency
The practices that keep spend proportional to value — right-sizing, autoscaling, spot capacity, and attribution that makes waste visible.
Topic 69
Reliability and SRE Practices
SLOs, error budgets, and the operational discipline — capacity, rollout, incident response — that keeps a cluster trustworthy.
Topic 70
Common Anti-Patterns
The recurring mistakes — latest tags, no limits, one giant namespace, snowflake clusters — and the fix for each.