Every engineering team must manage some level of operational load. But too much of it can get in the way of doing the important and engaging work that will make your organization—and your team—thrive. VMware Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) is no different. We are a team of site reliability engineers and program managers who work together with Tanzu customers and partner teams to learn and apply reliability engineering practices using our Tanzu portfolio of services.

When making changes to applications these days, it’s hard to understand and predict the impact of those changes before you deploy. API connections are multiplying, and with new cloud platforms such as containers/serverless, it only add to the complexity. Some people have trouble remembering whether they closed the garage door or turned off the coffee maker. Can you remember all the details of your latest API contract change? Let alone who would be impacted and needed to be notified?

On October 22, 2020, Shipa launched a new web series called “Coffee & Containers.” C&C was conceived as a place for practitioners and IT leaders to learn and collaborate on all things microservices, cloud-native, containers, Kubernetes, etc. We were very proud to launch this series with Kelsey Hightower, Thought Leader and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform, and Bruno Andrade, Founder and CEO of Shipa.io.

While the Docker buzz has faded a bit, replaced by new words like “Kubernetes” and “Serverless”, there is no arguing that Docker is the default toolchain for developers looking to get started with Linux containers, as it is fairly ubiquitous and tightly integrated with a variety of platforms.

In our previous guide, we documented 10 Docker anti-patterns. This guide has been very popular as it can help you in your first steps with container images. Creating container images for your application, however, is only half the story. You still need a way to deploy these containers in production, and the de facto solution for doing this is by using Kubernetes clusters. We soon realized that we must also create a similar guide for Kubernetes deployments.