Docker & Kubernetes Due Diligence

Container Lifecycle: From Image Build to Production Runtime

Container infrastructure reveals engineering maturity faster than application code. We examine the full pipeline: how images are built, how they’re stored, how they’re deployed, and how they run in production. Immutable images with proper tagging signal mature CI/CD. Latest tags and manual kubectl apply signal fire-fighting.

Kubernetes configuration quality tells us about operational practices. Declarative manifests managed through GitOps indicate a team that values reproducibility. Imperative changes applied directly to clusters indicate a team running on institutional knowledge. We check for proper namespacing, RBAC, network policies, and resource management.

Infrastructure-as-code coverage is a key indicator. Teams with Terraform-managed clusters can recreate infrastructure in hours. Teams with manually provisioned clusters can’t. We assess IaC coverage, module quality, state management, and drift between code and reality.

Container Orchestration Risk Factors and Failure Scenarios

We classify risks by impact and remediation effort. Critical risks - containers running as root in production, no network policies, secrets in plaintext - require immediate attention. High risks - missing resource limits, no pod disruption budgets, manual deployments - need attention within the first quarter.

Scaling readiness gets its own assessment. Can the cluster handle 10x traffic? Are horizontal pod autoscalers configured? Is the cluster autoscaler enabled? What happens when a node fails? We simulate failure scenarios against the architecture and document what breaks.

We evaluate the team’s operational capability alongside the infrastructure. Runbooks, incident response procedures, monitoring coverage, and deployment frequency paint a picture of how the team actually operates, not just how the infrastructure is configured.

Container image hygiene is a reliable indicator of security posture and build pipeline maturity. We inspect Dockerfiles for multi-stage builds, minimal base images (distroless or Alpine versus full Ubuntu), and proper layer caching that keeps build times reasonable. Image scanning results from tools like Trivy or Snyk reveal whether the team actively remediates CVEs or lets vulnerability counts grow unchecked. Registry management practices matter too: are old images cleaned up with retention policies, or does the registry grow unbounded consuming storage and making it harder to audit what is actually running? We check whether images are signed and whether admission controllers enforce signature verification before pods are scheduled, preventing unauthorized images from reaching production.

Platform Maturity Score and Remediation Plan

The report quantifies technical debt in container infrastructure with specific remediation costs. Each finding includes severity, business impact, remediation approach, and estimated effort. Investors get a clear picture of what works, what’s risky, and what it costs to fix.

We provide a maturity score across dimensions: build pipeline, deployment automation, security, monitoring, and operational procedures. This score benchmarks against industry standards and provides a concrete basis for technical negotiations. The remediation roadmap prioritizes by risk and effort, giving the acquiring team a clear plan for the first 90 days.