Guest post by Danielle Cook, Content Marketing Director, Fairwinds
Whether you are new to Kubernetes or you have deployment experience, Kubernetes has complexity that you’ll need to overcome. The Kubernetes Maturity Model offers an entire end-to-end overview of your Kubernetes journey, what phases you go through and what skills and activities you need to learn/undertake in each.
The Kubernetes Maturity Model exists to help you self-identify what stage you are at, understand gaps in your environment and gain insights into enhancing and improving your Kubernetes stack.
As you use the maturity model, know that if you do reach a certain phase, you may still need to revisit previous phases. Also, understand that Kubernetes maturity doesn’t happen overnight – it takes time. The Kubernetes Maturity Model should be used as a tool to help you understand where you need to focus attention, or require help, during your journey to cloud native.
Here we provide a quick summary of each phase. Read the in-depth review of each stage.
Phase 1 Prepare
In adopting Kubernetes, the first stage is preparation. You are contemplating how cloud native and Kubernetes will help you drive your business and technical objectives, what it will cost, and what you intend to achieve. Here it is vital to understand, and be able to articulate, why cloud native and Kubernetes is important to an organization. Some core concepts include understanding the value and impact of cloud native computing, containers and Kubernetes.
Phase 2 Transform
Transform is the stage where you move to Kubernetes. In this phase, you will verify your foundational knowledge and understanding by deploying your first clusters and workloads. In the transformation phase, you should feel prepared on the basics, but at the same time may lack the expertise necessary to complete the phase. You will spend a lot of time in the transformation phase. It covers your initial implementation, migration and learning curve as you undertake some key activity. As you adopt Kubernetes, don’t be fooled by “up and running” articles.
Phase 3 Deploy
When you reach this stage, you and your team will have the basics covered. One app or service now runs in production, external dependencies are plumbed in properly, traffic is being routed to Kubernetes via a load balancer, and logging and metrics are accessible. You’ll also have autoscaling in place. This stage in the Kubernetes maturity model is for you to undertake everything from implementing the build and deployment process, setting up CI/CD, empowering developers and introducing some limited monitoring and observability.
Phase 4 Build Confidence
As your Kubernetes environment matures, you will have laid a solid foundation. Now as you reach phase four in the maturity model, it is time to build confidence. In phase three, you got your Kubernetes infrastructure up and running. Phase four is where you start to understand the nuances of Kubernetes. It’s important to remember that building confidence will take time as you repeat tasks and experience similar scenarios.
Phase 5 Improve Operations
You are actively deploying Kubernetes across business successfully. Now you want to improve Kubernetes security, efficiency and reliability of Kubernetes clusters.
Phase 6 Measure & Control
The next phase of Kubernetes maturity is when you introduce more measurement and control of the environment. You and your team are functioning well within Kubernetes, have overall understanding and there is organization-wide adoption. You are developing a deeper functional understanding of Kubernetes and opinions on how things should be done within clusters and the overall environment. Further, the team is ready to tackle technical debt from previous phases. Previous stages have introduced some monitoring and observability. In this stage, you will gather and process more data, insights and tooling for you to start understanding what to measure and track and how to control Kubernetes.
Phase 7 Optimize & Automate
The next phase of Kubernetes maturity is when you introduce more measurement and control of the environment. You and your team are functioning well within Kubernetes, have overall understanding and there is organization-wide adoption. You are developing a deeper functional understanding of Kubernetes and opinions on how things should be done within clusters and the overall environment. Further, the team is ready to tackle technical debt from previous phases. Previous stages have introduced some monitoring and observability. In this stage, you will gather and process more data, insights and tooling for you to start understanding what to measure and track and how to control Kubernetes.
You can read the full Kubernetes Maturity Model at https://www.fairwinds.com/kubernetes-maturity-model. It should be used as a tool to help you along your cloud native journey.