Many of Spot’s AWS customers are using Kubernetes Operations (kops) to self-manage their Kubernetes clusters. The tool significantly simplifies cluster set up, lifecycle management via instance groups, Kubernetes Day 2 operations and generates Terraform configurations, making it a popular tool for deploying production-grade k8s clusters.

Kubernetes provides a powerful networking model for microservices. One of the pillars of this model is that each pod has its own IP address and is directly addressable within the cluster. As a consequence, each Kubernetes cluster usually has a flat virtual network that external hosts can’t reach directly. That means routing traffic from clients outside the cluster to services deployed inside the cluster requires some additional work.

Deploying a new feature to production is a momentous occasion. It's important to ensure that everything goes properly at this stage, as deployments tend to be error-prone when not handled correctly. To examine why this is and how you can avoid it, let's take a look at the different types of deployments available and where some of them fall short.

Focusing on these five essential workflows for secure DevOps will help you get started implementing monitoring, security, and compliance for containers and Kubernetes. You might be starting to adopt DevOps and find that it dramatically simplifies deploying applications in containers and Kubernetes. However, you probably also found that it adds a new set of complexities for managing, securing, and troubleshooting applications.