Whether you’re new to Kubernetes or you already have experience deploying K8s, Kubernetes is complex, and organizations adopting cloud native technologies need to to overcome those complexities. The Fairwinds team created the Kubernetes Maturity Model based on years of experience deploying and optimizing Kubernetes to share an end-to-end overview of the adoption Kubernetes journey, outlining the phases you’ll go through and the skills you’ll need to learn (and practice), as well as the activities you need to complete in each phase.
Danielle Cook is co-author of the Kubernetes Maturity Model, co-organizer of the CNCF Cartografos Working Group and VP of Marketing at Fairwinds. Danielle introduces the Kubernetes Maturity model, discusses each phase and how the model can help Kubernetes users adopt cloud native technology.
Co-author of the Kubernetes Maturity Model and VP of Marketing at Fairwinds
As you progress through the different stages of the Kubernetes Maturity Model, keep in mind that even after you reach a certain phase, you may find it helpful to revisit previous phases. This is a learning process, and Kubernetes itself – and its ecosystem – continue to mature. Also, remember that Kubernetes maturity doesn’t happen overnight – it’s a process, and it takes time. Use the Kubernetes Maturity Model as a tool to help you understand where you need to focus your attention, when you might require help from outside resources, and when the right tools will help you achieve your goals.
Before you get started, take some time to consider how cloud native and Kubernetes will help you drive your business and technical objectives, what it will cost, and what you intend to achieve. It’s not for everyone, and you may decide to go a different direction for your organization – which is why it’s so important to understand, and be able to articulate, why you think cloud native and Kubernetes is important to your organization. Identify and discuss what value you expect adoption of Kubernetes to provide. Make sure you ask the following questions as part of your process:
- Will it drive your business and technical objectives?
- Do you understand what costs are associated with Kubernetes adoption?
- Has your team considered what goals you expect to achieve?
It’s essential to get buy-in from your team and your leadership organization, so make sure you can articulate the value of containers, cloud-native, and Kubernetes internally before you expect your organization to take the next step.
Phase 1: Transform
Once you have your organization on board with Kubernetes, you’re ready to get started. This phase is when you verify your foundational knowledge of Kubernetes by deploying your first clusters and workloads. Expect to spend a lot of time in this phase, because it covers your initial implementation and migration. Now is when you’ll become comfortable with Kubernetes terminology and able to map your existing technologies to the cloud native context. There’s a significant learning curve during this phase, so expect it to take time. Give yourself space to learn how to set up clusters, and don’t expect to be production ready right away.
Beyond adopting a new language and architecture, you’ll also be undergoing a complex technical transformation that will take a lot of time and investigation. This is a great time to uncover technical debt in your existing systems and ensure that you don’t replicate it in your new environment. You may see some productivity hits as your teams learn the new technology and adjust to changes in the culture and processes for collaboration and delivery of apps and services. During the transformation phase, you’ll start to feel prepared on K8s basics, but at the same time may lack the expertise you need to complete the phase. You may want to bring in Kubernetes experts to help you set up your first clusters to ensure that they meet the demands of your workloads.
Phase 2: Deploy
When you start this phase, your team has covered the basics. You’re already running one app or service in production, your external dependencies are properly plumbed in, you’ve ensured that traffic is being routed to Kubernetes via a load balancer, and you know how to access logging and metrics data. You’ve also implemented autoscaling, so you can see how your app or service responds to variable demands. That alone is significant progress, and you’re ready for the next steps:
- Implementing the build and deployment process
- Setting up continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD)
- Empowering developers to deploy to Kubernetes
- Empowering operators with access to the Kubernetes API
- Introducing limited monitoring and observability
The time you spend training and empowering your developers and ops teams during this phase helps your organization to successfully adopt Kubernetes. Make sure they have time and flexibility to learn Kubernetes operator fundamentals, explore both open source and vendor tools for monitoring and observability, and are thinking about how to mature your Kubernetes environments.
Phase 3: Build Confidence
Phase 1 and 2 took time, but they laid a solid foundation for your organization. Now it’s time to get confident! Your Kubernetes infrastructure is up and running, which is essential to understanding the nuances of Kubernetes. In this phase, you might already feel comfortable in some areas, but still lack confidence in others. For example, as you work more with liveness and readiness probes, you’ll learn how small configuration changes alter your workload’s behavior. Gaining confidence in this area helps you make necessary changes to make a positive impact. As you increasingly understand nuances around configuration changes, you’ll start training other members of your team.
Many people learn by doing, and this is the perfect phase for that — and for experimenting to make improvements. Best of all, you won’t panic if something breaks in your Kubernetes cluster, because you have the confidence to fix it! Kubernetes has an amazing open source ecosystem, and during this phase you’ll evaluate tools that help improve your security, set correct resource utilization, help with upgrades, and much more. If you’re struggling in some areas, consider training, professional and managed services, audits, and configuration validation. Kubernetes is complex, so don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it.
Phase 4: Improve
You’ve reached a new milestone with phase four! You’re actively deploying and shipping features successfully into Kubernetes. Now that you have a solid foundation and feel confident, it’s time to improve the security, efficiency, and reliability of your Kubernetes clusters. To do that, you need visibility into your configurations.
- Security: identify who is responsible for Kubernetes cluster security and how it will be managed.
- Efficiency: identify who is responsible for monitoring resource utilization to ensure you are not over provisioning or under provisioning resources.
- Reliability: evaluate the reliability of your systems and implement self-healing, autoscaling functionality — and ensure that you are not introducing configuration problems.
Each of these areas requires you and your team to develop and enforce policies across your clusters. Enforcing policies automatically increases visibility and control across clusters, helping you to focus on your business instead of on maintaining Kubernetes. You may choose to hire in-house Kubernetes experts or look to outside experts to overcome complex challenges and reduce maintenance and operations efforts.
Phase 5: Control
This is the last phase of the maturity model, and you and your team are functioning well within Kubernetes. The time you’ve spent in the earlier phases of the model have paid off, and you’ve developed a deeper functional understanding of Kubernetes. You’re ready to use more sophisticated monitoring and alerting to help you understand common issues and how to solve them. This is when you’ll improve how you measure your K8s environment and track success, focusing on five key areas:
- Security — Identify the vulnerabilities that exist in your containers or clusters, measure how many vulnerabilities you have, and track when and how often you are patching workloads, clusters, or add-ons.
- Auditing — Create an audit trail to identify who performed recent actions and what actions workloads are taking in your clusters. This helps you identify whether unauthorized access or actions have occurred.
- Drift — Identify which workloads don’t conform to your standards, what versions of dependencies and cluster add-ons are running, and whether workloads are compatible with future versions of Kubernetes.
- Efficiency — Measure the typical or standard resource usage of your workloads and the typical capacity/usage of nodes within your clusters. Track how often your clusters are scaling.
- Velocity — Measure how often deployments are being shipped, how many users access your clusters, and the most common actions taken within your clusters. This will help you improve your deployment velocity.
This information will help you improve and refine your Kubernetes environment to make sure that it’s delivering against your business requirements. It will also help you identify pain points around consistency, particularly related to Kubernetes workload security; configuration standards; and workflows for deploying workloads and services, promotion paths, and responsibilities. Identifying these issues will help you decide what control policies you want to put in place and how you want to enforce those policies. An external audit of your Kubernetes environment is a great tool to help you make improvements, and configuration validation tools can help you consistently enforce your new policies.
Ongoing optimization
You’ve reached Kubernetes maturity, but remember, this is an ongoing process. Now is the time to focus on optimizing and automating your environment to improve cost and efficiency. Using the tracking and measurement you set up in phase five, you’ll have visibility into that data in dashboards, which will help you optimize Kubernetes to maximize efficiency and reliability. Optimizing your clusters is an ongoing process, based on new data and application usage. Increased automation will help you audit and flag misconfigurations and security issues, reduce human error and limit human access to production environments, and simplify build, upgrade, and backup systems. Configuration validation tools built into the CI/CD process will help you ensure that you’re not deploying security, reliability, and efficiency problems to production.
Read the full details of the Kubernetes Maturity Model at https://www.fairwinds.com/kubernetes-maturity-model. Use this model as a tool to help you on your cloud native journey to evaluate where you are, what to expect next, and how you can improve Kubernetes maturity in your organization.
About Fairwinds
Fairwinds is the trusted partner for Kubernetes security, policy and governance. With Fairwinds, customers ship cloud native applications faster, more cost effectively and with less risk. We provide a unified view between dev, sec and ops removing friction between those teams with software that simplifies complexity. Visit us at www.fairwinds.com
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