---
title: "Lessons From Our 8 Years Of Kubernetes In Production — Two Major Cluster Crashes, Ditching Self-Managed, Cutting Cluster Costs, Tooling, And More"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/lessons-from-our-8-years-of-kubernetes-in-production-two-major-cluster-crashes-ditching-self-mana-1bk0fsakx
source_url: https://medium.com/@.anders/learnings-from-our-8-years-of-kubernetes-in-production-two-major-cluster-crashes-ditching-self-0257c09d36cd
type: article
source: "Medium"
published: 2024-02-07T08:43:26.440Z
updated: 2024-05-09T09:28:05.588Z
tags: ["cloud", "startup", "devops", "kubernetes", "cloud-native", "observability"]
reading_time: 15
upvotes: 17
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Lessons From Our 8 Years Of Kubernetes In Production — Two Major Cluster Crashes, Ditching Self-Managed, Cutting Cluster Costs, Tooling, And More

**[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 15 min read · 17 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Lessons learned from running Kubernetes in production for 8 years include the complexity of Kubernetes, the importance of managing Kubernetes certificates, keeping Kubernetes and Helm up to date, maintaining centralized Helm charts, disaster recovery planning, backing up secrets, considering vendor-agnostic vs "going all in" approaches, and optimizing node types and cost with reserved instances. Observability through monitoring, alerting, and logging is crucial, and security measures like access control and container vulnerability scanning are necessary. The company experienced two major cluster crashes due to certificate expirations. Migrating from self-managed on AWS to managed on Azure (AKS) improved ease of use, integrated Azure services, and reduced costs. Overall, Kubernetes has been a game-changer for the company, providing scalability, cost optimization, improved developer experiences, and faster time-to-market for new products and services.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://medium.com/@.anders/learnings-from-our-8-years-of-kubernetes-in-production-two-major-cluster-crashes-ditching-self-0257c09d36cd>

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---

Tags: [#cloud](https://daily.dev/tags/cloud), [#startup](https://daily.dev/tags/startup), [#devops](https://daily.dev/tags/devops), [#kubernetes](https://daily.dev/tags/kubernetes), [#cloud-native](https://daily.dev/tags/cloud-native), [#observability](https://daily.dev/tags/observability)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/lessons-from-our-8-years-of-kubernetes-in-production-two-major-cluster-crashes-ditching-self-mana-1bk0fsakx)