# Kubernetes: Production readiness self-assessment Think you’re ready for production? Ensuring that your Weaviate cluster is production-ready requires careful planning, configuration, and ongoing maintenance. Ensuring that you have a stable, reliable deployment requires you to think of your _ending_ at the _beginning._ This guide provides you with introspective questions to assess readiness and identify any potential gaps before moving your workloads into production. :::callout{intent="tip"} If you _do_ identify gaps within your deployment, be sure to reach out to your SE (solutions engineer) who can help steer you on the path to production success! ::: ### High Availability and Resilience - [ ] Are your clusters deployed across multiple availability zones (AZs) or regions to prevent downtime? - [ ] Are you running Weaviate in a highly available setup with a 3-node minimum? - [ ] Have you configured your schema to use a replication factor of 3 to ensure copies of data are available during node outage? - [ ] Are replicas deployed across multiple nodes for redundancy? - [ ] Is your control plane highly available? - [ ] Is your application fault-tolerant _without_ your control plane? - [ ] Are there automatic node repair or self-healing mechanisms in place? - [ ] Have failover scenarios been tested to validate resilience? - [ ] Are you utilizing Weaviate’s backup capabilities for disaster recovery? - [ ] How often are these mechanisms tested? - [ ] Has the ability to recover from a node failure or database corruption been tested? - [ ] Have you thought about the retention period of backups? - [ ] How do you clean up any out-of-date backups? - [ ] Are rolling updates performed to avoid downtime? - [ ] Are canary deployments implemented to safely test new releases? - [ ] Do you have development or test environments to safely test changes? ### Data Ingestion and Query Performance - [ ] Is there a strategy for handling heavy ingestion loads? - [ ] Has the percentage of resources for indexing vs querying applications been specified? - [ ] Is there a defined strategy for data deduplication and cleanup before ingestion? - [ ] How frequently is data added, updated, or deleted? - [ ] Is data updated in place or mostly append-only - [ ] How often do deletion operations trigger garbage collection? - [ ] Have you implemented a scheduling strategy for large ingestion jobs? - [ ] Have you tested query performance under load? - [ ] Is query performance monitored using Prometheus or Grafana? - [ ] Have replica shards been deployed for load balancing and failover support? ### Resource Management - [ ] Have you considered your data’s consumption pattern(s)? - [ ] Has your memory allocation been right-sized to match workload demand? - [ ] Has your storage/compute allocation also been right-sized to match workload demand? - [ ] Is there a process to delete old or unused objects? - [ ] Have multiple replicas been configured to balance read-heavy workloads? - [ ] Has the proper storage class been selected for your needs? - [ ] Does your storage class support volume expansion so that you can support growth over time? - [ ] Is the data within your cluster properly backed up, including the persistent storage? - [ ] Is the sharding strategy aligned with the size and access patterns of the dataset? - [ ] Is `GOMEMLIMIT` properly configured for memory management? - [ ] Is `GOMEMLIMIT` set based on available system memory to prevent excessive garbage collection pauses? - [ ] Have you considered vector quantization techniques to reduce memory requirements? ### Tenant State Management - [ ] Are you implementing multi-tenancy? - [ ] Are there limits or quotas per tenant to avoid noisy neighbor issues? - [ ] Is there a strategy for offloading inactive tenant data? ### Security - [ ] Are the components of your cluster communicating via SSL/TLS and trusted certificates? - [ ] Is the _“principle of least privilege”_ being followed? - [ ] Are your container security defaults set properly? - [ ] Is access to your cluster strictly limited? - [ ] Has [RBAC](../authorization-and-authentication/weaviate-configuration-rbac.md) been implemented to restrict access? - [ ] Have network policies been implemented to limit pod-to-pod communication? - [ ] Are secrets secured with K8s Secrets or a vault solution? - [ ] Do you have a process for when secrets are exposed, when access is lost to a key or certificate, and when secrets need to be rotated? ### Monitoring and Observability - [ ] Is logging implemented? - [ ] Are the collected logs stored centrally? - [ ] Is metric collection enabled using Prometheus (or Alloy, DataDog, or another monitoring platform)? - [ ] Are health and performance metrics being visualized in Grafana? - [ ] Are alerts configured for events? Evaluate these key areas to build a highly available, resilient, and efficient deployment that will scale to meet your business needs. By ensuring that these self-assessment questions have been addressed, you can proactively identify potential risks and maximize the reliability of your deployment. ## Questions and feedback Have a question or feedback? Here's how to reach us. ::::card-grid :::card{title="Community Forum" href="https://forum.weaviate.io/c/support" icon="messages-square"} Ask questions and connect with other developers on our **Community forum**. ::: :::card{title="Support" href="/guides/support-overview" icon="life-buoy"} Weaviate Cloud user or customer? Find the right channel on the **Support page**. ::: :::: ## Related pages - [Agents](./agents-index.md) - [AI-assisted Weaviate code generation](./ai-assisted-vibe-coding-index.md) - [APIs](./apis-index.md) - [Authorization and authentication](./authorization-and-authentication-index.md) - [Benchmarks](./benchmarks-index.md) - [Best practices](./best-practices-index.md) - [Client libraries](./clients-index.md) - [Client Libraries / SDKs](./client-libraries-index.md) - [Cloud](./cloud-index.md) - [Cloud account management](./cloud-account-management-index.md) # Agent Instructions This portal answers questions programmatically. To receive a synthesized, source-cited answer instead of crawling page by page, append the `?ask=` query parameter to any page URL on this site: /guides/quickstart?ask=how+do+I+authenticate Optional parameters: - `&goal=` steers the answer toward your objective (e.g. `&goal=write+a+python+client`). - `&version=