Updated July 2026. Refreshed for current microservices best practices.
Why Kubernetes for Microservices?
Kubernetes (K8s 1.29+) is the de facto platform for running microservices. It handles deployment, scaling, self-healing, service discovery, and rolling updates — letting you focus on application logic instead of infrastructure scripts.
Production Checklist
- Deployments — declare desired replicas, image tags, resource limits.
- Services — ClusterIP for internal, Ingress for external traffic.
- Health probes — liveness (restart if dead), readiness (route traffic when ready).
- HPA — Horizontal Pod Autoscaler on CPU/memory or custom metrics.
- ConfigMaps & Secrets — externalize config; never bake secrets into images.
- Resource requests/limits — prevent noisy neighbors and OOM kills.
- Network policies — restrict pod-to-pod communication.
- GitOps — Argo CD or Flux for declarative deployments.
Sample Deployment Snippet
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: order-service
spec:
replicas: 3
template:
spec:
containers:
- name: order-service
image: myregistry/order-service:1.2.0
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
livenessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /health
port: 8080
readinessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /ready
port: 8080
resources:
requests:
memory: "256Mi"
cpu: "250m"One Service Per Deployment
Deploy each microservice as its own Deployment with independent scaling. Share nothing except the cluster and observability stack. Use namespaces to separate dev, staging, and production.
Next: Service Mesh with Istio · Microservices Introduction
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Kindson Munonye is a software engineer and technical author specializing in microservices, CQRS, event sourcing, and distributed systems. He publishes free step-by-step tutorials and live classes on Alkademy.