Kubernetes for operations and support teams
Kubernetes introduces new operational patterns for managing applications and infrastructure. As an operations or support engineer, understanding how Kubernetes works helps you maintain healthy production environments and respond effectively to incidents.
This page explains how Kubernetes fits into the work of operations and support teams and highlights common patterns, tools, and best practices.
Why operations and support teams use Kubernetes
Operations and support teams use Kubernetes to:
- Monitor the health of workloads and infrastructure in production
- Investigate and resolve incidents affecting Kubernetes services
- Manage day-to-day maintenance activities such as scaling and upgrades
- Respond to alerts generated by Kubernetes and application observability pipelines
- Troubleshoot performance, availability, and networking issues
- Coordinate with platform engineering and SRE teams on reliability and capacity planning
- Support application teams during deployments and rollbacks
What operations and support teams manage in Kubernetes
As an operations or support engineer, you typically:
- Monitor cluster and node health (resource usage, readiness, availability)
- Investigate Pod and Service status during incidents
- Validate network paths and troubleshoot connectivity issues
- Participate in backup, restore, and disaster recovery operations
- Review and troubleshoot resource utilization and scaling events
- Respond to and investigate alerts triggered by Kubernetes and observability pipelines
- Assist in managing cluster upgrades and maintenance windows
- Support incident response processes and postmortems involving Kubernetes workloads
- Provide runbook documentation and first-line support for Kubernetes-based services
Common tools for operations and support teams
- kubectl: Inspect nodes, Pods, Services, and Events
- k9s: Terminal UI for live Kubernetes troubleshooting
- Prometheus / Grafana: Visualize cluster and application metrics
- Alertmanager: Manage and respond to alerts
- Loki / Fluent Bit / EFK stack: Aggregate and analyze Kubernetes and application logs
- Velero: Perform backup and restore operations
- Lens: GUI-based Kubernetes management and troubleshooting
- Cloud provider consoles: Monitor managed Kubernetes services (EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift)
Common questions operations and support teams ask
- How do I check if a Kubernetes node or Pod is healthy?
- How do I troubleshoot a Pod stuck in Pending or CrashLoopBackOff?
- How do I investigate connectivity problems between Services or external endpoints?
- How do I determine if resource exhaustion is causing application problems?
- How do I respond to alerts generated from Kubernetes or workloads?
- How do I verify the success of backup and restore operations?
- How do I validate that scaling events are working correctly?
- How do I safely perform cluster upgrades and coordinate with application teams?
- How do I document and automate common operational procedures for Kubernetes?
Best practices for operations and support teams
- Regularly monitor cluster and node resource usage (CPU, memory, storage, network)
- Understand key Kubernetes Events and how to interpret them
- Use observability tools (metrics, logs, traces) to gain complete visibility into Kubernetes workloads
- Maintain up-to-date runbooks for common Kubernetes troubleshooting tasks
- Participate in regular testing of backup and restore workflows
- Collaborate with platform and SRE teams to validate scaling configurations and SLOs
- Implement alerting best practices to ensure actionable and relevant alerts
- Test incident response and disaster recovery scenarios periodically
- Continuously learn about Kubernetes architecture and evolving operational patterns
Next steps
Explore additional role-based guides:
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