Designing a Stable Backend Architecture: CI/CD, Federated Monitoring, Logging, Documentation, and Traffic Management on Kubernetes
The article analyzes why a company's clusters were unstable—unstable release process, missing monitoring and logging, insufficient documentation, and unclear request routing—and proposes a comprehensive solution built around Kubernetes‑centric CI/CD, a federated Prometheus monitoring platform, Elasticsearch logging, centralized documentation, and Kong/Istio traffic management.
Introduction
Our clusters were constantly on the brink of failure; after three months of investigation we identified five root causes: an unstable release process, lack of a monitoring platform, missing logging system, insufficient operational documentation, and unclear request routing.
Solution Overview
Unstable Release Process
We rebuilt the release pipeline by fully containerizing services and establishing a Kubernetes‑centric CI/CD workflow.
Release Process Details
The process includes three steps: test cases, image packaging, and pod updates. Deployment involves creating namespaces, image‑pull secrets, persistent volumes, deployments, services, and ingress. Images are stored in an internal Alibaba Cloud repository accessed via VPC, avoiding public network latency.
Service Deployment Diagram
Federated Monitoring Platform
We built a reliable, multi‑cluster monitoring system based on Prometheus, supplemented by shell/Go scripts and Sentry for alerting via WeChat or email. The platform aggregates OS‑level, application‑level, and business‑level metrics, providing pre‑failure alerts across all clusters.
Logging System
To address log scarcity in a fully Kubernetes‑ized environment, we adopted Elasticsearch as the core log collection system, storing logs centrally to enable long‑term retention, search, and analysis.
Operational Documentation
We created a documentation hub using Yuque to centralize operation manuals, scripts, and troubleshooting guides, ensuring that all operational steps are recorded and easily accessible.
Request Routing Clarification
We re‑designed traffic flow by integrating Kong as the edge gateway and Istio for service‑to‑service authentication and authorization, providing a unified view of north‑south and east‑west traffic.
Conclusion
By integrating a Kubernetes‑centric CI/CD pipeline, a Prometheus‑based federated monitoring platform, an Elasticsearch logging system, a Yuque documentation center, and Kong/Istio traffic management, we can achieve high availability and reliability for services running on Kubernetes clusters.
Top Architect
Top Architect focuses on sharing practical architecture knowledge, covering enterprise, system, website, large‑scale distributed, and high‑availability architectures, plus architecture adjustments using internet technologies. We welcome idea‑driven, sharing‑oriented architects to exchange and learn together.
How this landed with the community
Was this worth your time?
0 Comments
Thoughtful readers leave field notes, pushback, and hard-won operational detail here.