KubeCon Salt Lake City 2024 kicks off Day 1 scheduling tomorrow—we hope to see you there! We’re hosting a meetup, Rundeck by PagerDuty in Salt Lake City, just outside the conference grounds. Register here to join us.

Kubernetes popularity continues to grow, with over 60% of organizations maintaining multiple Kubernetes across diverse environments and teams in some capacity. However, as  clusters multiply, so do operational challenges: from monitoring hundreds of microservices to responding to and escalating incidents across distributed systems.

Organizations scaling Kubernetes operations face the daunting task of maintaining consistency, minimizing downtime, and standardizing tooling—all while avoiding the time drain and risk of errors that come with manual intervention.

PagerDuty automation offers a solution to transform Kubernetes complexity into operational clarity by automating critical workflows, minimizing manual toil, and accelerating resolution times. Here are three key ways PagerDuty Automation can help uplevel your Kubernetes operations:

1. Standardized operational workflows
2. Self-service automation
3. Automating incident response and critical processes

Let’s explore these in more detail.

Standardized operational workflows
Organizations struggle with inconsistent workflows across teams, tools, and systems. This inconsistency heightens the risk of errors and leads to operational unpredictability, undermining system stability.

When teams rely on the manual execution of complex processes, the variability introduced can result in configuration drift, creating inefficiencies that slow down progress, especially when operating at scale across distributed and remote environments.

PagerDuty Automation addresses these issues by empowering teams to implement standardized workflows run for one orchestration engine for all Kubernetes tasks, from deployment to scaling. This approach ensures that every operation is executed consistently and accurately, significantly reducing the potential for human error and operational risk.

Consistent, automated workflows ensure compliance, reduce errors, and enable faster, more reliable deployments, supporting the organization’s agility and stability.

Self-service automation
Some organizations only have a handful of experts on staff—or a single expert they rely on to deploy or execute certain automations. Teams depend on their expertise and they become the bottleneck, slowing down the entirety of the execution itself. This results in frequent escalations or prolonged delays while non-experts try to diagnose problems, as well as critical work operations like scaling deployments or adding capacity.

To execute automation in Kubernetes, teams must be equipped with the right tooling that spreads expert-level knowledge and reduces silos between application-development teams and their counterparts in operations. Implementing a self-service layer on top of K8s and adjacent tooling can help improve operations, uplevel junior engineers and reduce burnout. A self-service layer integrated with K8s provides a simplified interface with guardrails where senior engineers can give end-users the ability to perform tasks in their clusters.

PagerDuty Automation provides an intuitive, self-service interface that empowers non-experts to trigger automation during incidents or routine operations without needing to understand the ins and outs of Kubernetes. By abstracting away the technical details and adding secure, self-service guardrails, this interface reduces the complexity often associated with Kubernetes, making automation more accessible to a broader range of users.

This approach not only accelerates time-critical work, but also drives automation adoption across teams with pre-built and standardized automation processes, enabling access to anyone who needs it—not just the experts who built it. By democratizing safe access to automation, it streamlines routine tasks and minimizes dependencies between teams–ultimately leading to fewer interruptions, escalations, and faster problem resolution.

Automating incident response and critical processes
Ensuring a consistent and effective incident response across Kubernetes environments is critical to preventing downtime, protecting revenue-generating services, and making sure your customers remain happy with their user experiences.

Because of so many moving components, it is sometimes difficult to pin down the makeup of an issue for an application running on Kubernetes. Unintended behavior could be isolated to a single container, one or more pods, a controller, control-plane components, or one of the underlying infrastructure components.

PagerDuty Automation can be the conduit to help fortify the incident response layers and remove the noise fragmented across your Kubernetes environment. PagerDuty AIOps helps by leveraging automation and AI to group and correlate alerts based on a number of factors, such as time, alert description, and service dependencies. Additionally, by implementing pre-defined workflows for various Kubernetes incidents, such as pod failures and load balancing, you can minimize the need for manual intervention and increase the speed in which these incidents are resolved.

By coupling your Kubernetes operations with PagerDuty Automation, you will enhance system resilience, reduce downtime risk, and keep customer trust intact.

Automation library for Kubernetes use cases
Modern enterprises expect curated integrations with the solutions they use in their environments. The PagerDuty Automation Library offers a robust collection of pre-built automation templates that are specifically designed to streamline Kubernetes operations.

Teams can quickly implement standardized workflows for tasks such as pod status, self-healing, and resource scaling. This library accelerates the deployment process and ensures consistent execution of best practices, empowering organizations to maintain optimal performance in their Kubernetes environments.

Unsure where to start with automation? PagerDuty simplifies the process with pre-built automation templates for common Kubernetes use cases.

By taking the guesswork out of Kubernetes operations, these solutions empower teams to quickly implement automation without the need for deep expertise, streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency. Check out more information by visiting our Automation Use Case Library.

Want to learn more? Contact us today and sign up for our upcoming webinar, Kubernetes Operations with Rundeck and PagerDuty Automation, on December 12th.

See you at KubeCon SLC!