Running Kubernetes and Azure Kubernetes Service in production, written for platform engineers and cluster operators rather than newcomers to containers. Topics include production hardening checklists, policy enforcement with OPA Gatekeeper and Kyverno admission controllers, pod disruption budgets that survive node drains and upgrades, ingress controller comparisons across nginx, Traefik, and Application Gateway, observability with managed Prometheus and Grafana, and node pool right-sizing and autoscaling to cut cluster cost. Tested against the Kubernetes, AKS, and controller chart versions named in each article.
6 articlesAKS monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana made practical: enable managed scraping, build alert rules, and deploy production dashboards in under an hour.
Read article →OPA Gatekeeper vs Kyverno compared: Rego vs YAML authoring, mutation, policy testing, webhook latency, Azure Policy for AKS, and a decision framework.
Read article →How Pod Disruption Budgets really work: minAvailable vs maxUnavailable, percentage rounding, blocked AKS drains, eviction API behaviour, and monitoring.
Read article →AKS cost optimization that holds: right-size node pools from real usage, tune the cluster autoscaler, split system and user pools, and use spot safely.
Read article →AKS production hardening done right: 2026 checklist covering RBAC, network policy, node security, and reliability patterns to protect live clusters.
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