A container image is step one. This is about secrets that never land in Git, health checks that mean something, and rollbacks you can actually trust when deploy goes sideways.

Docker & Kubernetes Production Patterns

A Dockerfile that builds on your laptop is not production. Production is what happens when the image runs for months, secrets rotate, traffic spikes, and someone deploys on a Tuesday without a war room. This post is about the patterns we use so those Tuesdays stay boring.

Docker images

Multi-stage builds keep final images small: compile or bundle in one stage, copy only what runs into a slim runtime (Alpine, distroless, whatever matches your risk tolerance). Run as a non-root user when the app allows it. Pin image tags, not latest, so a deploy from last month is reproducible. A HEALTHCHECK in the image helps orchestrators know when a container is lying about being ready.

Kubernetes basics that matter

Use Deployments for stateless apps, with resource requests and limits set from real measurements, not copy-pasted YAML. Secrets and ConfigMaps hold config; real secrets should come from a secret store or operator, not from an image layer. Liveness restarts dead pods; readiness keeps traffic away from pods that are not ready yet. HPA scales when CPU, memory, or custom metrics say you need more copies.

Why this matters

Most outages we see are misconfigured resources, missing probes, or secrets baked into images. None of that requires a microservices PhD. It requires discipline and a few reviews.

We help teams harden Docker and Kubernetes setups for real traffic. If your deploys feel fragile, we can tighten the basics first.

Cogent Softwares, DevOps and cloud-native development.