As organizations move to develop mission-critical applications in Kubernetes, they need a way to ensure that configuration best practices are applied consistently organization-wide. Without an easy way to ensure that configurations are secure and applications use resources efficiently, organizations risk losing all the strategic gains that adopting Kubernetes promises.
Here are the three main challenges we see organizations struggle with as they operationalize Kubernetes in the enterprise.
1. Security. Security teams and development teams have different goals — security teams want to mitigate risk, development teams want to get new features into production as soon as possible. In addition to having different incentives, they also have different areas of expertise — application developers are not as familiar with potential Kubernetes security problems; security teams are not as familiar with app development.
2. Resource efficiency. Application developers are not generally involved in specific discussions about how much their applications cost to run. As a result, when defining limits to a workload’s CPU or memory usage, application developers often take the easiest route and give each workload limits that are far more than actually needed. Across the entire enterprise, this leads to applications that cost more than necessary.
3. Reliability. Both security and resource definition issues impact application reliability directly, but so do other configuration issues like ensuring that Kubernetes health checks and self-healing capabilities are correctly set up.
A configuration validation platform helps bridge the gaps in incentives and knowledge between application developers, security teams and operations teams so that they can work together to ensure configurations are managed correctly, organization-wide.
Centralized control means security teams and platform teams can see what all workloads’ configurations are, easily spot necessary changes, and communicate those changes with application developers.
Checks and balances mean that someone is always reviewing that configurations were done properly, reducing the risk of mistakes and facilitating knowledge sharing between teams.
Learn how Kubernetes configuration validation helps organizations build safer, more reliable applications that use cloud resources efficiently including:
Explore the various options organizations have for getting control of their configurations — and why a purpose-built platform is usually the best choice. Get Kubernetes security, cost allocation and avoidance, compliance and guardrails in one platform for free with Fairwinds Insights.
