Most Kubernetes advice assumes you have a platform team: specialists who own upgrades, ingress, security policies, and the 2 a.m. pages.
The teams I am writing for usually have three to ten engineers, one of whom “knows Kubernetes,” and no dedicated platform team. They depend on a cluster that nobody fully owns.
I work in enterprise environments where platform teams are large and everything is process. This article is the opposite exercise: what is the minimum discipline a small team needs to run Kubernetes in production—and what enterprise baggage should it refuse to copy?
The question that matters more than any tool
Before any checklist: who owns the platform after the migration is finished?
