How to Harden Your Kubernetes Cluster for Production

Best practices for securing your Kubernetes cluster in production

Photo by MILKOVÍ on Unsplash

Kubernetes has changed the way organizations deploy and run their applications, and it has created a significant shift in mindsets. While it has already gained a lot of popularity and more and more organizations are embracing the change, running Kubernetes in production requires care.

Although Kubernetes is open source and does it have its share of vulnerabilities, making the right architectural decision can prevent a disaster from happening.

You need to have a deep level of understanding of how Kubernetes works and how to enforce the best practices so that you can run a secure, highly available, production-ready Kubernetes cluster.

Although Kubernetes is a robust container orchestration platform, the sheer level of complexity with multiple moving parts overwhelms all administrators.

That is the reason why Kubernetes has a large attack surface, and, therefore, hardening of the cluster is an absolute must if you are to run Kubernetes in production.

There are a massive number of configurations in K8s, and while you can configure a few things correctly, the chances are that you might misconfigure a few things.

I will describe a few best practices that you can adopt if you are running Kubernetes in production. Let’s find out.

Use a Managed Kubernetes Service if Possible

If you are running your Kubernetes cluster in the cloud, consider using a managed Kubernetes cluster such as Google Kubernetes Engine or Azure Kubernetes Service.

A managed cluster comes with some level of hardening already in place, and, therefore, there are fewer chances to misconfigure things. A managed cluster also makes upgrades easy, and sometimes automatic. It helps you manage your cluster with ease and provides monitoring and alerting out of the box.

Upgrade Kubernetes Frequently

Since Kubernetes is open source, vulnerabilities appear quickly and security patches are released regularly. You need to ensure that your cluster is up to…