Kubernetes Production Deployment Checklist for SaaS Teams

Before Going to Production

Security

• RBAC configured with least-privilege service accounts
• Network policies restricting pod-to-pod traffic
• Secrets in Kubernetes Secrets or external vault (not in images)
• Container images scanned for CVEs in CI pipeline
• Pod security standards enforced

Reliability

• Liveness and readiness probes on every deployment
• Resource requests and limits set (prevent OOM kills)
• Pod Disruption Budgets for zero-downtime deploys
• Multi-AZ node distribution
• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler configured

Observability

• Prometheus metrics + Grafana dashboards
• Centralized logging (ELK, Loki, or CloudWatch)
• Distributed tracing for microservices
• Alerting on error rate, latency p99, pod restarts

Operations

• Automated backups for stateful workloads
• Disaster recovery runbook documented
• CI/CD deploys via GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux) or pipeline
• Staging environment mirrors production topology

Common Production Failures

1. No resource limits → one pod consumes entire node

2. Missing readiness probes → traffic routed to starting pods

3. Single replica → downtime on every deploy

4. Secrets in git → credential leaks

[Cloud & DevOps services](/services/cloud-devops-services) — SinghJi Tech sets up production Kubernetes on AWS, Azure, and GCP.