1) Treating Kubernetes like a magic box
Kubernetes is powerful, but it isn’t a strategy. Many teams toss everything into one cluster with ad-hoc YAML and call it a day. That creates configuration drift, snowflake services, and painful incident response.
Fix: Pick a small, boring set of patterns and enforce them:
- One base Helm chart or Kustomize pattern for all services
- Namespaces by environment (dev/qa/stage/prod)
- Network policies and resource limits by default
- Ingress standard (e.g., Traefik/NGINX) + TLS everywhere
2) CI/CD without an audit trail
“It works on my laptop” is a running joke for a reason. If deploys aren’t controlled, logged, and reproducible, you lose both speed and trust.
Fix: GitOps + CI gates:
- All changes via pull request; no manual prod edits
- Required checks: unit tests, basic security scan, image signing
- Promotion by tag (dev → stage → prod) with automated changelogs
- Secrets in a vault; never in repo, never in CI logs
3) Observability later (aka never)
Teams often wait for incidents to add dashboards. That slows root cause analysis and blocks compliance questions like “who did what, when?”
Fix: Make it a first-class feature:
- Central logs with structured fields (service, version, request id, actor)
- Metrics: golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation)
- Traces for critical paths (auth, checkout, data export)
- SLOs and basic pager rules; monthly postmortems
Fast-start template
If you need to move now, use a minimum viable stack:
- Infra: Managed K8s (EKS/GKE/AKS), IaC (Terraform), one ingress, one storage class
- Delivery: GitHub Actions + ArgoCD/Flux, image signing, env promotion
- Obs: Logs + metrics (e.g., Loki/Prometheus/Grafana) with dashboards checked into git
The payoff
These fixes give developers speed and create the evidence trail security and buyers look for. You’ll ship faster, sleep better, and close deals sooner.
Need help? I implement this stack with early-stage teams as a fractional CTO. hello@ctodirect.io • Book a 20-min intro