A Kubernetes migration changes more than where containers run. It changes deployment, networking, storage, and how a team investigates failure. The migration plan needs to cover those operational changes alongside the workloads.
Begin with the workload inventory
Map each service’s dependencies, background jobs, persistent data, configuration, and external integrations. Identify which services can move independently and which need coordinated releases.
Make the first workload representative enough to reveal real deployment and operating problems, while keeping its failure impact manageable.
Define what a healthy release means
Readiness should reflect whether a service can receive traffic. Liveness should identify a condition where restarting the process can help. Treating every dependency outage as a reason to restart can make recovery harder.
Give applications a graceful shutdown path. Test the behavior during a rollout, including requests in flight and work held by background processes.
Prove the recovery path
Before moving critical services, exercise rollbacks, node disruption, and recovery of persistent data. Capture the commands, ownership, and signals needed to make a decision under pressure.
A successful deployment is only one result. The platform also needs a team that can explain a failure and restore service predictably.