What This Stack Does
Running Kubernetes in production is a team sport that requires tools for each concern: infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, monitoring, and visualization. This stack assembles the CNCF-standard tools that most production Kubernetes clusters depend on. Every tool here is open source and battle-tested at scale — the operational cost is your team's expertise, not software licensing.
Provisioning Infrastructure and Building Images
Terraform provisions the cluster infrastructure itself — VPCs, subnets, the managed Kubernetes service (EKS, GKE, AKS), node pools, IAM roles, and supporting services. By declaring infrastructure in HCL and managing it through state, Terraform ensures that your cluster infrastructure is reproducible, version-controlled, and auditable. Changes go through pull request review, not console clicks.
Docker builds the container images that run on Kubernetes. Dockerfiles define application environments, multi-stage builds optimize image size, and BuildKit provides advanced caching and multi-platform support. While Kubernetes uses the OCI container standard (not Docker specifically), Docker remains the most widely used tool for building those images. Local development with Docker Compose lets developers run their services before pushing to the cluster.
GitOps Deployment with ArgoCD
ArgoCD handles application deployment through GitOps — Git repositories are the single source of truth for what should be running on the cluster. ArgoCD continuously monitors repositories and automatically syncs application state to match. Deployments happen through Git commits, not kubectl commands. Rollbacks are Git reverts. Audit trails are commit history. This model brings software engineering discipline to operations.
Monitoring and Visualization
Prometheus collects metrics from every component in the cluster — node resource usage, pod health, application custom metrics, and Kubernetes control plane metrics. The pull-based scraping model integrates naturally with Kubernetes service discovery — new pods are automatically discovered and scraped. PromQL queries power both real-time debugging and alerting rules. Alertmanager routes notifications to Slack, PagerDuty, or email based on severity and routing rules.
Grafana visualizes everything. Pre-built dashboards for Kubernetes cluster monitoring show node capacity, pod resource usage, deployment status, and cluster health at a glance. Custom dashboards display application-specific metrics that Prometheus collects. The combination of Prometheus for data collection and Grafana for visualization has become so standard in the Kubernetes ecosystem that it's essentially assumed infrastructure — if you run Kubernetes, you run Prometheus and Grafana.