Most teams don't need a "DevOps transformation." They need three things:
"We'll add RBAC later."
I've heard this sentence on 4 different projects. "Later" usually means "after the security audit finds it" or "after an incident."
RBAC isn't a nice-to-have. In a shared Kubernetes cluster, it's the difference between teams coexisting safely and one team accidentally deleting another's production workloads.
Your containers are running. Your app is working. Your security posture? Probably has gaps you don't know about.
After securing containerised workloads across multiple enterprise environments, here are the 5 things I find teams consistently overlooking.
"We're moving to microservices."
Every time I hear this, my first question is: "Why?" And in about half the cases, the answer boils down to "because everyone else is."
Here's what nobody in the microservices evangelism camp tells you: you need a platform to make microservices work. Without one, you're trading one set of problems for a worse set.
GitOps is elegant in theory: Git is the single source of truth, every change is auditable, infrastructure converges to the desired state automatically.
In practice? If your Git hygiene is broken, GitOps just automates the chaos faster.
"Should we use AKS or run our own Kubernetes?"
I've had this conversation at least a dozen times. The answer is almost always AKS — but there are legitimate reasons for self-managed. Here's the honest comparison from someone who's run both.
Helm is the de facto package manager for Kubernetes. It's powerful, widely adopted, and the first tool most teams reach for.
It's also overused, over-complicated, and sometimes the wrong tool entirely.