This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Shaheer Akram
Kubernetes clusters are easy to spin up — but making one that's secure, scalable, and developer-friendly? That's the real challenge.
I recently published a detailed, opinionated guide:
👉 How to Make Your K8s Cluster — a Great Cluster
This article walks through everything we’ve learned running hardened, production-grade clusters in the wild — including practices you won’t always find in the docs.
🛠️ What’s inside?
📦 Terraform/Ansible-based cluster provisioning
🔁 GitOps-first workflows with ArgoCD (App of Apps)
🔐 Secrets via Vault, no root containers, SSO-only access
📊 Prometheus, Grafana, and meaningful alerts
☠️ Chaos testing and real disaster recovery drills
💻 Backstage + Dev tooling to make platforms dev-friendly
🚨 Automated upgrades, cert rotation, version hygiene
🧠 Whether you're running EKS, GKE, or bare-metal clusters — this is a blueprint you can adapt and evolve.
👇 I'd love to hear from you:
What’s your definition of a great cluster?
What's one trick you’ve learned the hard way that you wish others knew?
Let's learn from each other — because great clusters aren't born, they’re built.
💬 Comments, feedback, and memes welcome.
📎 How to make a k8s cluster
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Shaheer Akram

Shaheer Akram | Sciencx (2025-05-04T13:29:07+00:00) 🚢 How to Make Your K8s Cluster — a Great Cluster. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/05/04/%f0%9f%9a%a2-how-to-make-your-k8s-cluster-a-great-cluster/
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