Kubernetes & Docker Services for Production Workloads

Docker Compose is perfectly suited for local development and simple single-server deployments with a handful of services. Kubernetes becomes necessary when you need auto-scaling, multi-node high availability, rolling deployments with zero downtime, or are running many services across a team of engineers. For early-stage startups, Docker Compose on a single VM often scales further than expected.

GKE is the most mature and operationally polished managed Kubernetes, making it a top choice for pure Kubernetes workloads. EKS is the natural choice if you are heavily invested in AWS services. AKS integrates best with Azure AD and Microsoft tooling. All three are production-ready — the right choice usually follows your primary cloud provider.

Stateful workloads use StatefulSets with persistent volumes backed by cloud-native storage (EBS, GCP Persistent Disk, Azure Disk). For databases we typically recommend managed cloud databases (RDS, Cloud SQL) rather than running them in-cluster, unless there is a specific technical or cost requirement to do so.

A service mesh like Istio or Linkerd manages communication between microservices — providing mutual TLS encryption, traffic management (canary, circuit breaking), and distributed tracing. You need it when you have ten or more microservices, need zero-trust networking between services, or require fine-grained traffic control. For smaller deployments, it adds more complexity than benefit.

Cluster upgrades follow a defined process: upgrade control plane first via the managed provider, then cordon and drain nodes one availability zone at a time while new nodes running the target version are provisioned. We test all workloads against the new version in a staging cluster first. Automated upgrade tooling like Karpenter simplifies node lifecycle management on an ongoing basis.