Kubernetes Design Mistakes You Should Avoid

Author

Govardhana M K
February 05, 2026

TechOps Examples

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Kubernetes Design Mistakes You Should Avoid

Setting up a Kubernetes environment is far easier than running and optimizing it. In my 8+ years with Kubernetes, I have seen even mature companies fall into anti patterns. These are not beginner mistakes. Even the best practitioners repeat them, especially under scale, pressure, or team churn.

The top design mistakes I repeatedly see:

1. Single Cluster Deployment

Teams often start with a single production cluster and keep scaling everything into it (services, workloads, secrets, users, and integrations). It works fine until it doesn't.

In real world scenarios, I’ve seen how a single issue like a control plane outage, faulty node group update, or a bad deployment can take down the entire system. There is zero fault tolerance. There is no blast radius control.

Even large scale companies with strong DevOps teams end up routing all production traffic to a single cluster due to operational convenience. But convenience breaks under pressure.

What usually goes wrong:

  • Cluster goes unreachable during upgrade or KMS issue

  • One tenant affects others in a multi tenant shared cluster

  • Region specific outage takes down global access

  • No way to isolate or failover in critical production moments

Adopt a Multi Cluster Architecture:

  • Split production workloads across two or more regional clusters

  • Use DNS level routing or Global Load Balancers (like AWS Route 53, GCLB, Akamai) to handle failover and traffic steering

  • If SLA is critical, design clusters per business unit or per customer tier

  • Back up cluster state regularly using tools like Velero

Operational Tips:

  • Start with two clusters if budget allows, test multi cluster from Day 1

  • Set up observability and alerting per cluster (not globally)

  • Practice failover once every quarter

  • Avoid hardcoding cluster names or URLs into CI/CD pipelines or secrets

2. Chaotic Access Control

Giving broad cluster access for convenience is a dangerous habit. Devs accidentally access or delete production resources because RBAC was loosely configured.

This usually happens when teams share the same cluster for dev and prod, and use ClusterRoleBinding to quickly unblock access. Over time, there's no clear boundary between environments, and no visibility into who can do what.

Fix it with namespace scoped RBAC:

  • Use Role and RoleBinding instead of cluster wide bindings

  • Create separate access policies for dev, stage, and prod

  • Group users and bind roles to those groups

  • Only grant the minimum permissions needed

Practical Hygiene:

  • Run kubectl get rolebindings --all-namespaces regularly

  • Use tools like rakkess or kubectl-who-can

  • Never use system:masters for human users

3. No Policy As Code

Manual reviews and verbal guidelines are not security. In many teams, enforcement of naming conventions, image registries, host paths, and privilege flags is done through Slack messages or code reviews. That does not scale. It also does not prevent mistakes.

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