Cloud Native & Containers

How I think about running services in containers and orchestrating them.

Containers

• Small, single-purpose images. Rebuild from a clean base.
• Pin dependencies. Reproducible builds are a feature, not a chore.
• Don't run as root. Least privilege by default.

Orchestration

• Declare desired state, let the controller reconcile.
• Health checks are the contract between your app and the platform.
• Graceful shutdown: handle SIGTERM, drain connections, finish in-flight work.

Operations

• Everything fails eventually. Design for it.
• Rollouts should be boring: canary, observe, promote, roll back.
• Secrets are not config. Keep them out of images and logs.