Lesson 1: Production Mindset - Kubernetes Production Mastery

Description

Stop treating production Kubernetes like a bigger dev environment. In this first lesson, you'll learn the five failure patterns that consistently break at scale—OOMKilled surprises, RBAC blindspots, health check failures, storage disasters, and networking nightmares. Master the six-item production readiness checklist that separates resilient clusters from weekend incidents. 🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00009-kubernetes-production-mastery-lesson-01 📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub! Summary: • Production Kubernetes differs fundamentally from dev—optimize for reliability, security, and cost, not iteration speed • Five critical failure patterns: OOMKilled pods, RBAC misconfigurations, health check failures, stateful workload disasters, networking issues • Six-item production readiness checklist: resource limits, health checks, RBAC least privilege, multi-replica deployments, observability, security baseline • Production mindset: always ask "what happens WHEN this fails" and "can I debug this at 2 AM?" • Dev vs production: single cluster vs dozens, infinite resources vs constrained budgets, local restarts vs customer-facing incidents