Checking Your Kubernetes Maturity: A Practical Guide

In industry discussions in the last year, I've noticed an uptick in the use of
the term "Kubernetes maturity model" and how it reflects where teams are on their
Kubernetes journey.

This post outlines what I think of as the major milestones for Kubernetes maturity, assessment of your current position, and what work (and possibilities!) lie ahead.

What is a Kubernetes Maturity Model?

The Kubernetes maturity model is a roadmap for organizations adopting Kubernetes. The model helps teams understand:

• Where they currently stand in their Kubernetes journey
• What capabilities they should focus on next
• What best practices they should be implementing
• How to evolve from basic infrastructure management to advanced automation

Stage 1: Infrastructure as Code

Almost every team starts their Kubernetes journey with infrastructure provisioning. It usually goes something like: "We need Kubernetes clusters. Let's use Terraform to create them." Simple enough, right?

Not quite. As your organization grows, seemingly straightforward Terraform setups can become a tangled mess. I've seen teams run into three major challenges:

1. Blast Radius: Imagine having 10 clusters managed by a single Terraform state file. Every commit becomes a nail-biting experience - will this change accidentally impact all our clusters?

2. Permissioning: Without a solid strategy for applying Terraform configs, you end up with either too much access (dangerous) or too little (frustrating).

3. Operational Overhead: A single Kubernetes cluster upgrade can take 30 minutes. Now multiply that by your number of clusters. You need a robust execution engine that won't leave you with corrupted state when things go wrong.

At Plural, we tackled these issues head-on with our Stacks
approach. Think of Stacks as a way to make Terraform configurations reusable and predictable, with different variables for different environments. More importantly, they execute within the context of a Kubernetes cluster, providing a reliable layer that handles interruptions gracefully.

Stage 2: Continuous Deployment

Once you've got infrastructure provisioning figured out, the next piece of the puzzle is continuous deployment. This is where tools like ArgoCD come into play. But it's not just about deploying applications - it's about maintaining a standardized environment across all your clusters.

Why is this important? Because in most organizations, every cluster needs:

• Network security controls via tools like Calico
• Vulnerability management
• Observability tooling like Prometheus and Grafana
• Reliability components
• Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler

You need a central system that can:

1. Distribute these changes across all clusters
2. Provide an audit trail
3. Prevent unauthorized modifications

However, this creates an interesting security challenge: how do you maintain control without creating a dangerous "god mode" system that has access to everything? At Plural, we solved this through our agent-based architecture. Our agents communicate back to the control plane but execute commands locally with their own credentials. This dramatically reduces the attack surface while maintaining centralized control.

Stage 3: Self-Service and AI-Driven Operations

Once you have infrastructure provisioning and continuous deployment working smoothly, you've got the essential building blocks in place. But there are two more stages that separate the truly mature Kubernetes organizations from the rest: self-service infrastructure and AI-driven operations.

Self-Service Infrastructure

Say a development team needs a new database, object storage bucket, or Kubernetes namespace. In many organizations, this kicks off a multi-week process involving tickets, approvals, and infrastructure team sprints.

This is where self-service becomes crucial. Teams need the ability
to provision infrastructure on demand, but in a way that's:

• Compliant with security standards through tools like Open
  Policy Agent
• Consistent across the organization using GitOps practices.
• Actually reliable

At Plural, our answer is the Service Catalog.

The service catalog offers teams full self-service through PR Automations, which tie directly into existing PR-based review and approval processes. Teams can customize workflows throughout the resource lifecycle, and any infrastructure task can be represented as Terraform + GitOps code.

This means teams can provision infrastructure on demand while ensuring
compliance, consistency, and clear audit trails.

AI-Driven Operations

The final frontier of Kubernetes maturity is using AI to reduce operational overhead. At Plural, we've built an AI engine specifically designed to eliminate infrastructure grunt work. Our approach has several unique differentiators:

1. Bring Your Own LLM: Use your enterprise-approved LLM without worrying about third-party access to your data.

2. Always-On Troubleshooting: Our engine continuously monitors for:

   • Failed Kubernetes services
   • Failed Terraform runs
   • Other infrastructure issues
     It automatically investigates problems and summarizes findings, eliminating manual investigation time.

3. Automated Fixes: The system can:

   • Generate fix PRs automatically
   • Introspect GitOps code
   • Propose and implement solutions

4. AI Explanation: Complex or domain-specific issues can be explained with one click, reducing the support burden on your engineering team.

5. Interactive AI Chat: Any workflow can be refined through a ChatGPT-like experience where you can:

   • Paste additional context
   • Generate PRs once solutions are found
   • Get immediate answers to infrastructure questions

This means your team can focus on building value-added platforms instead of
answering repetitive questions, investigating the same misconfigurations, or
playing internal IT support.

Troubleshooting and Support

When you encounter issues along your maturity journey, it's important to have
the right resources available. Check out our guides for common issues and
solutions.

Remember: Kubernetes maturity isn't about adopting every new tool or technique. It's about building reliable, secure, and efficient operations that enable your organization to move faster. Focus on getting the foundations right, and the advanced capabilities will follow naturally.

Additional Resources

• Kubernetes Documentation
• CNCF Cloud Native Landscape
• Plural Documentation
• Complete Kubernetes Maturity Checklist