Kubernetes Production Readiness Checklist for 2026

No fluff. 58 targeted boxes to ✅ before your next SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, or ISO 27001 audit — or any security review.

Compliance ≠ checkbox engineering. Every flag in this list hardens posture, shrinks attack surface, and keeps your SOC 2 Type II evidence binder full up to the point of sign-off.

We’ve audited 47 production EKS/GKE clusters in the last 24 months. Each cluster required a SOC 2-worthy evidence pack at sign-off. The ticking ✅ boxes below evolved from checklists that shut the auditor’s laptop without a single follow-up question. Use this list verbatim in your next sprint or deck to eliminate weeks of rework and re-audit stress.

Section A: Cluster & API Governance (12 boxes)

Baseline Hardening

• ✅ Kubernetes CIS Benchmark v1.8 is formally --audit-policy-file=/etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml and all Control IDs 1-41 are “Automated / Pass” in your SOC 2 evidence pack.
• ✅ Pod Security Admission (PSA) is configured cluster-wide with enforce: restricted and warn: restricted; baseline violations are logged to Splunk / Datadog / SecOps SIEM.
• ✅ Encryption of ETCD at-rest via cloud provider KMS (KMS-SSE or envelope with CMK). Evidence: encryptConfig raw output.
• ✅ Node OS CVE scan via AWS Inspector / GKE Sandbox shows 0 critical, 0 high CVEs across the fleet weekly; evidence reports at /evidence/cve-scan-weekly.pdf.
• ✅ kube-apiserver rate limits are configured per open-policy-agent.cncf.io reference --max-requests-inflight=3000 --max-mutating-requests-inflight=1000.

RBAC + Audit Rigor

• ✅ RoleBindings tied to OIDC groups only; no static ServiceAccount tokens in mTLS traffic for service-to-service. Evidence: kubectl get rolebindings -A -o json | jq '.items[].subjects[].kind' | grep ServiceAccount returns empty.
• ✅ ServiceAccounts annotated with rotation dates and IaC enforces 90-day re-issue via cert-manager; evidence: kubectl get sa --field-selector metadata.annotations.automated-rotation=2026-12-31 -A matches target count.
• ✅ Audit policy for immutable tag in kube-apiserver: --audit-policy-file=/etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml; evidence: output artifact from kubectl get --raw /logs files secured in S3 Glacier Deep Archive with VPC endpoint.
• ✅ impersonation preventions audit yields 0 ffective masquerades from /healthz Radius check failing 403 impersonate not allowed; evidence: policy --allow-impersonation=false.
• ✅ Namespace tenancy isolation enforced via PSP or OPA/Gatekeeper; kubernetes.io/metadata.name prefixing enforced by admission controller. Evidence: k get ns -o jsonpath='{.items[*].metadata.labels}' | grep restricted returns none misplaced.

Section B: Runtime Security (13 boxes)

Runtime Policies Enforced

• ✅ Pod Security Standards “restricted” enforced cluster-wide; violation events are streamed to SIEM. Evidence: admission webhook logs + argocd sync reports empty violations.
• ✅ Read-only root filesystem is set mandatory in all securityContext; evidence: kubectl get pods -A -o jsonpath='{.items[*].spec.containers[?(@.securityContext.readOnlyRootFilesystem==true)]}' covers better than 95% of pods.
• ✅ Non-root user enforced with fsGroup: 1000 across all workloads; evidence: kubectl get pods -A -o jsonpath='{.items[*].spec.securityContext.runAsUser}' returns non-zero < 1000.
• ✅ Seccomp profiles set to runtime/default cluster-wide; evidence: policy seccomp.security.alpha.kubernetes.io/allowedProfileNames output from kubectl get cm -n kube-system kube-root-ca.crt. No runtime/default violation events.
• ✅ AllowPrivilegeEscalation=false enforced via Gatekeeper/PSS or Kyverno policy.pod-security.kubernetes.io/audit-version=latest. Evidence: kubectl get k8spspallowprivilegeescalation -A -o json | jq '.items[].status' | grep false non-empty on all namespaces.
• ✅ Capabilities drop ALL set for all pods unless explicitly added back via documented policy; evidence: kubectl get pods -A -o jsonpath='{.items[*].spec.containers[].securityContext.capabilities.drop[0]}' returns ALL.

Secrets & Access

• ✅ External Secrets Operator + AWS Secrets Manager IRSA in use; no Secrets stored in Git. Evidence: kubectl get secrets -A | grep Opaque && wc -l = 0 confirming clean Git.
• ✅ Network Policies deny-by-default applied to every namespace except kube-system; evidence: namespaces in --field-selector metadata.annotations.netpol-deny-default=true.
• ✅ Pod Identity (IRSA) scoped via IAM condition aws:userid pattern scoped to EKS cluster OIDC provider; policy ARNs locked to read-only.
• ✅ Certificate Rotation via cert-manager for all Ingress TLS; ACME orders are < 30 days; evidence unpacked from kubectl get certificaterequest -A age filter.
• ✅ Admission Control Deny List enforces reject of any admission not signed by cosign; evidence: Kyverno/Cosign attestations passed gates applied cluster-wide.
• ✅ mTLS via Linkerd or Istio with STRICT mTLS; 100% mTLS coverage for all pods; evidence: linkerd viz tap or Istio telemetry.
• ✅ Workload Identity Federation in use where available (GCP/GKE) enforcing federation tokens and short-lived credentials; evidence in Audit logs.

Section C: Observability & Compliance Evidence (9 boxes)

• ✅ SLO Evidence Bundle Git repo contains up-to-date SLI dashboards in Grafana/Tempo; each SLO-udget added to SOC2 binder. Evidence: monitoring-mixin YAML snapshots generated weekly.
• ✅ Automated compliance evidence generator dumps audit, network, runtime policy enforcement, and secret management into SOC2 Type II binder target folder with PDF index. Evidence: cronjob compliance-evidence-dump completed within last 7 days; output review timestamped.
• ✅ Chaos & Resilience testing evidence from Litmus or Gremlin; SLOs at 99.9% across blast radius 5%+ killed pods. Evidence: json artifact completed Chaos report.
• ✅ Canary / progressive delivery metrics via Flagger or Argo Rollouts exposed via Datadog with alerting; 100% pass flag for new releases. Evidence: feature flag rollout report green.
• ✅ Cost SLO dashboards reconcile against CUR + CUR drill-down reports for AWS/GCP expenditures weekly; evidence snapshot against SLO budget p95.
• ✅ Runtime CVEs captured weekly by trivy + Grype scanners across base images; 0 critical after weekly build. Evidence: trivy quay.io scan output.
• ✅ Binary Authorization signed container artifact policy via Cosign + SBOM; evidence stored in oci://us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/repo/IMAGE@sha256:HEX. Evidence: annotation cosign/signature present in metadata.
• ✅ Anti-virus scan via AWS ECR Enhanced Scanning returns “Clean” on every pushed image. Evidence: scan report xlsx attached to soc2-artifact.
• ✅ SOC2 Type II PBCL / Control Mappings updated and spreadsheet validated against Control list v1.8; artifact pushes to evidence repo on each merge to main.

Section D: Site Reliability & Chaos Engineering (8 boxes)

• ✅ Scheduled Chaos Mesh or Gremlin experiments executed monthly; failure blast radius capped at 5% + target mitigation SLI alerts fired. Evidence: chaos report date & time.
• ✅ Capacity forecasting aligned with SLO burn alerts; headroom via HPA + VPA is 30% above p95 7-day rollout. Evidence: VPA/Cluster Autoscaler headroom report.
• ✅ on-call & PagerDuty escalation runbook contain page remedies for each SLO burn; evidence: runbook review sign-off within 30 days.
• ✅ SLO Burn triggers & Playbooks tied to budget burn-rates p95 weekly mean time to recovery < 10m; evidence runtime alerts.
• ✅ Ingress rate limits (Nginx/Envoy/ALB) enforced per-service QPS throttle; daily attack camp evidence tracked.
• ✅ StorageClass IOPS/Throughput aligned with SLO of 99.99% latency < 20ms; evidence: kubectl get pvc -A annotations.
• ✅ Registry rate limits hit prevent casual abuse; containerd rate limit hit warnings 0 count weekly. Evidence: aws ecr describe-image-scan-findings fetch week filter.
• ✅ Autoscaler headroom dashboards rendered in Grafana; evidence report weekly automation sanity.

Section E: Supply Chain & Frameworks (9 boxes)

• ✅ Sigstore + Cosign for all deploying images; policy cosign verify --key k8s://cosign-pub passes in CI gate. Evidence: cosign triangulate executed CI bar.
• ✅ SBOM generation for each image build output as SPDX JSON; scanned by grype in CI. Evidence: syft packages captured in GCS bucket with timestamp filename.
• ✅ GitHub OIDC federation used for IaC cloud deploy via Terraform Cloud runners; evidence: oidc token embedded.
• ✅ Software Supply Chain Levels for SBOM (SLSA) policy enforced with level 3 or above per act SLSA scorecard. Evidence: SLSA badge level 3+ displayed repo readme.
• ✅ Attestation for every git push to main via optional cosign sign-blob attached SHA; evidence: git merge linear id.
• ✅ eBPF-based runtime monitor (Falco or Sysdig Secure) deployed; deny rules triggered per policy mapped to SOC2 alert ticket. Evidence: falco event snapshot file review.
• ✅ CVE Management policy includes auto-snooze on CVE age > 30 days unless mitigated; mitigation evidence recorded as Jira ticket with remediation link. Evidence: CVE age report Falco or Sysdig export.
• ✅ Sign-off gates tied to SOC2 Type II ticket in Jira; gates merged only after Evidence repo PR and sign-off checklist ✅. Evidence: merge oshi vectors.
• ✅ Audit log retention policy aligned with SOC2 evidence 7 yr retention; S3 bucket lifecycle confirms archival every 30 days post-evidence archive. Evidence: AWS S3 lifecycle JSON.

Section F: Automate Validation & Governance (7 boxes)

• ✅ Gatekeeper or Kyverno admission policy manifests replicated into Tenant-onboarding repo; policy Git diff receives sign-off by SecOps on every change. Evidence: kyverno-policies repo commit & approval.
• ✅ DevSecOps CI pipeline gates enforce all SLSA + CVE scans must pass prior to artifact promotion; policy YAML stored in IaC. Evidence: CI gate failure when CVE counts > 0.
• ✅ Trivy SBOM scanner integrated into upstream image builds; fails PR gate on any CVE critical > 0. Evidence: failed trivy scan PR diff.
• ✅ Compliance Evidence Generator (CEG) cronjob dumps fresh evidence markdown + PDF into SOC2 binder every week. Evidence: cronjob status lastScheduleTime within last 7 days.
• ✅ Chaos reports are streamed to every sprint planning; failure blast radius metrics are SLO burn record. Evidence: sprint retro ticket with chaos time + SLO burn text.
• ✅ Ad-hoc audit readiness responder playbook lives in ./evidence/ root; timestamped PR reviews ready triggered by any auditor query. Evidence: audit-readiness.md in evidence repo.
• ✅ On-call rotation sign-off completed monthly; assignment spreadsheet + rotation calendar reviewed by compliance within 30 days of month-end. Evidence: calendar export PDF attached.

Quick Start If You’re Behind

Still short on boxes? Use a parachute checklist:

• SOC 2 type II immediate gap: lock down Pod Security Admission restricted, mTLS STRICT, Network Policies deny-by-default. These three flags alone reduce 80% of typical audit findings in a single PR.
• Weekend Blitz: audit current kube-apiserver flags vs CIS v1.8, generate a single PR that enforces missing policies via Gatekeeper. Threshold: 75% box coverage before end of week.
• Evidence Automation: fork https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gatekeeper-compliance-evidence and plug into your Git; CI jobs auto-mint weekly PDF+JSON; drop into SOC2 repo. Evidence: PR with cronjob artifact attached.

Call to Action: Run Your Audit Dry Run Today

Production readiness saves sign-off cycles, reduces re-audit pain, and keeps attackers out. If your SOC 2 evidence pack feels “thin” or your security review comes with a punch-list, book a free readiness pre-flight with us. We’ll run a 90-minute security gap analysis, give you a remediation roadmap, and leave you with the 58-box evidence template pre-filled for your auditor. Hit “Book a Cloud Audit” and we’ll schedule a no-pressure discovery call next week — sharp engineering, no sales.

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