Kubernetes Is Not the Answer. It's the Beginning of 1,000 New Questions.

Kubernetes is not the answer. It's the beginning of a thousand new questions. Networking, storage, secrets, scaling, service mesh - solve one thing, three more pop up. The starting point was a monolithic application where one bad deploy could take down everything. Manual deployments. Zero auto-scaling, zero self-healing. Downtime was not a bug - it was just accepted as normal. The migration to GKE: containerize the monolith first without rewriting it, build a minimal deployment and iterate, decompose into microservices each independently deployable, add a service mesh for traffic control and mutual TLS between services. No big-bang rewrite. Just steady, validated steps. Here is the part nobody warns you about. Kubernetes networking is its own universe - ingress controllers, DNS resolution, load balancing across services. Config management becomes critical: secrets rotation, ConfigMaps, Helm charts for everything. Resource tuning is an art - set limits too low and pods get killed, too high and you waste money. And without proper logging, metrics, and tracing, debugging in Kubernetes is like finding a needle in a haystack made of other needles. The result: zero-downtime…