Overview
Many teams run their applications on a handful of servers: a few VMs, dedicated machines from a hosting provider, or hardware in an office or data centre. Each app lives on a specific box, deployments are scripts or manual steps, and when a server or process dies, someone gets paged to fix it by hand.
This engagement turns those servers into a single Kubernetes cluster and deploys your applications onto it. You keep the hardware and hosting you already pay for, and gain the operating model that cloud teams rely on: applications that restart and reschedule themselves, deployments that roll out gradually and roll back cleanly, and one place to see what is running and how healthy it is.
What You Get From Kubernetes
- Self-healing applications — crashed containers are restarted automatically, health checks take unresponsive instances out of traffic, and if a server goes down its workloads are rescheduled onto the remaining servers.
- Zero-downtime deployments — rolling updates replace instances gradually and stop if new ones fail their health checks, with a one-command rollback to the previous version.
- Better use of your hardware — applications are packed across all servers based on the CPU and memory they actually request, instead of one app per box with idle capacity.
- Scaling — run more replicas of a busy service with a single change, or let it scale automatically on CPU or custom metrics within the capacity of your servers.
- Monitoring and alerting — Prometheus and Grafana dashboards for servers, the cluster, and each application, with alerts sent to Slack, email, or your on-call tool.
- Centralized logs — logs from every application and server in one searchable place, instead of SSH-ing into machines to read files.
- Consistent, repeatable deployments — every application is described in version-controlled manifests or Helm charts, so environments can be rebuilt and changes reviewed like code.
- Automatic HTTPS — an ingress controller routes traffic to your apps, and cert-manager issues and renews TLS certificates.
What's Included
- Server review — operating system, resources, networking, and storage on each server, and a plan for which machines take which roles
- Cluster installation — a lightweight, production-ready distribution such as k3s or RKE2 (or kubeadm where it fits better), with a highly available control plane when you have three or more servers
- Networking and traffic — cluster networking, a load-balancer address on your own network (MetalLB or kube-vip), ingress, and TLS
- Persistent storage — local or replicated storage (for example, Longhorn) for applications that keep data, chosen to match your hardware
- Application migration — containerizing your apps if needed, writing Kubernetes manifests or Helm charts with health checks and resource limits, and moving them over one at a time
- Observability — Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and log aggregation with dashboards and starter alerts
- Backups — cluster and volume backups (for example, with Velero) to storage you choose, with a tested restore
- Handover — architecture diagram, runbooks for common tasks such as adding a server or deploying an app, and a live walkthrough with your team
Our Process
- Discovery call — your servers, your applications, how you deploy today, and what problems you want to solve.
- Assessment and plan — a written plan covering cluster layout, storage, networking, and the migration order for your applications, agreed before anything changes.
- Cluster build — installation and core add-ons, validated with a first application before production workloads move.
- Migration — applications move over one at a time, with a rollback path for each, so the current setup keeps serving traffic until the new one is proven.
- Handover — documentation, runbooks, and a walkthrough so your team can operate the cluster.
Who This Is For
Teams running applications on their own or rented servers who want the reliability and deployment workflow of Kubernetes without moving to a managed cloud service: for cost, data-location, or compliance reasons, or because the hardware is already paid for.
What to Expect
Kubernetes makes the most of the servers you have, but it does not add capacity or remove single points of failure outside the cluster. Rescheduling after a server failure needs spare capacity on the other servers and at least two replicas of each application, and a highly available control plane needs three or more servers. If every server shares one power supply, network link, or location, that remains a risk, and we will flag it in the plan. Databases are reviewed case by case: some move into the cluster, others are better left where they are or run as a separate High Availability PostgreSQL setup.
FAQ
How many servers do I need? A cluster can start on a single server, but three or more give you a highly available control plane and room for applications to move when a server fails. We will recommend a layout based on what you have.
My applications are not containerized yet. Is that a problem? No. Containerizing them is part of the migration, the same work as the Docker Containerization service.
Will there be downtime during the migration? Applications move one at a time while the existing setup keeps running, so most can switch over with a DNS or proxy change. Anything that needs a maintenance window, such as moving a database, is planned with you in advance.
Can deployments run from our CI/CD pipeline? Yes. The cluster can receive deployments from GitLab CI/CD or GitHub Actions, or sync from Git with ArgoCD.
What if we later move to the cloud? Your applications will already be packaged for Kubernetes, so moving to EKS, GKE, or AKS is mostly an infrastructure change. See Production Kubernetes Setup for managed-cloud clusters.