Production Best Practices

These practices keep production workloads available and scalable under load. Each addresses a specific reliability objective with a concrete AWS/Kubernetes solution.

Autoscaling

Objective: Pods should automatically scale when traffic spikes, and the underlying instances should scale to serve that traffic.

Solution: Implement Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) to decide when to add pods, backed by AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) (or Azure VMSS) so node capacity scales with the pods. Autoscaling is triggered by HPA.

Monitoring

Objective: Avoid downtime caused by insufficient memory, disk, or CPU.

Solution: Install Container Insights in Kubernetes and create CloudWatch alarms for all pods and nodes.

Alert manager

Objective: Send alerts whenever Kubernetes resources (pods, ingress, deployments, services) go down or hit resource limits.

Solution: Create an SNS topic and integrate it with CloudWatch alarms so notifications are delivered by email.

Tracing

Objective: Distributed tracing across microservices for all requests.

Solution: Trace the lifecycle of each HTTP request by assigning a request ID programmatically. If a request is lost or errors, the request ID can be searched in logs and debugged. See the Observability section for the full OpenTelemetry setup.

High availability, backups & DB autoscaling

Objective: Database instances scale up as traffic increases and down as it decreases, while remaining highly available (targeting "five nines," 99.999% uptime) despite hardware, software, network, or power failures.

Solution: Enable auto backup, auto scaling, and create the cluster across two availability zones for high availability.

Sensitive data

Objective: Never include sensitive data (tokens, credentials, keys) as plain text in code, CI/CD scripts, or Dockerfiles.

Solution: Use secured environment variables — Docker envs, GitHub envs, ConfigMaps, and Secrets. See Encryption at Rest for how secrets are protected in AWS.

Third-party services

Use trusted, secure third-party tools and, where possible, self-host on your own EC2 machines/servers. Our projects run self-hosted PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ELK, Prometheus, Grafana, and SonarQube containers.

Performance

Objective: Performance-test the application before every update.

Solution: Use load-testing tools such as JMeter and Locust. See the Testing section for the full performance-testing approach.

Delete protection

To prevent accidental deletion, enable delete protection on all services.