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Platform Maturity Levels

The five levels are distinguished stages of implementation of a specific subset of features. These features increase capabilities of the platform in an incremental manner.
Each level includes strategies for achieving a specific level of maturity to provide more confidence in the platform and allows for running more critical software.

It was created to address the common challenges that many organizations face during the implementation of Kubernetes and adopting the Cloud Native approach such as:

  • How to create a platform for your apps based on Kubernetes in an evolutionary way?
  • Which areas should you focus on first and which are non-relevant?
  • Which technologies to choose?
  • What strategies and techniques are useful?
  • How to avoid common pitfalls?

Overview

See the overview of the model to check:

  • What are the benefits of reaching a particular level?
  • What are the prerequisites required to reach them?
  • What are the most important areas to focus on each level?
  • What are the DO’s and DON’Ts?

5 Levels and 4 Pillars

The approach with 5 levels is more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It’s more practical and takes into account the time needed for learning new tools and processes.

It also allows the platform’s capabilities to be better aligned with the organization’s context (e.g. existing software, policies, restrictions, etc.).

Each level can introduce or extend the use of particular practice or technology (e.g. GitOps, Zero Trust Environment, Progressive Delivery, Chaos Engineering etc.) at a different advancement level.
The additional division into 4 pillars allows the different needs of the organization to be met. Some may choose to prioritize security before upgrading performance or delivery to the next levels.

Work In Progress

I’m preparing a more detailed version of the document where I will cover technologies as well as strategies required to develop a platform to reach the particular levels of maturity:

Security
Advanced Access Management
Restricted Container Runtime
Security checks within CI/CD (a.k.a, shift security left)
Advanced Data Protection
Advanced Vulnerabilities Management
GitOps Platform Management
Platform Access Auditing
All traffic encrypted
Advanced Workloads Auditing
Compliance Policies Enforcement
Advanced Traffic Filtering
Identity-based Access Control (e.g. Istio, SPIRE)
Zero Trust Environment
Network Traffic Auditing
Basic Secrets Management
Basic Vulnerabilities Management
Basic Traffic Filtering
Basic Access Management
Unrestricted Container Runtime
Basic Cluster Updates
Availability

Hard multi-tenancy
Basic Platform Monitoring
Basic Disaster Recovery
Platform Observability
Application Observability
Manual Disaster Recovery Testing
Continuous Resiliency Improvement
Automated Node Provisioning
Advanced Platform Monitoring
Disaster Recovery for Persistent Storage
Chaos Engineering (non-prod)
Kubernetes auto-updates
Advanced Disaster Recovery Testing
Error Budget Management
GitOps Platform Management
Fault-tolerant Workload Distribution
Platform SLA 
Chaos Engineering in Production
Multi-cluster Platform

Delivery
Advanced Delivery Processes
Advanced Deployment Management
Golden Paths
DORA Metrics
Extended Images Build Processes
GitOps Application Management
Extended Delivery Processes
Kubernetes Landing Zone
Internal Developer Platform
Advanced Build Processes
Basic Delivery Processes
Basic Build Processes
Basic Deployment Management
Extended Delivery Processes
Efficiency
Cluster Autoscaling
Advanced Application Autoscaling
Advanced Volume Management
Costs Center Management
Platform Landing Zones
Advanced Resources Management
Advanced Costs Management
Just-in-time Capacity
Basic Resources Management
Basic Application Autoscaling
Manual Application Scaling
Unmanaged Cluster Resources

What's next

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