Kubernetes Consulting in Lübeck – Setup, Operations, Migration

Rule of thumb: Kubernetes is worthwhile starting from 5-10 microservices or with highly variable loads. For medium-sized companies with a monolith or fewer than 5 services, we often recommend managed container services (AWS ECS, Azure App Service) as a more pragmatic entry point. In Lübeck, we observe Kubernetes adoption mainly among rapidly growing SaaS and platform companies.

The typical path is: 1) Migrate Docker Compose setups to Helm charts or Kustomize, 2) Validate with a local cluster (Kind, Minikube), 3) Set up a managed cluster (EKS, AKS, GKE) for production, 4) Implement GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux. For medium-sized enterprise migrations, we typically need 6-12 weeks, depending on the number of services and the maturity of the CI/CD pipelines.

For cloud-native setups, we recommend the managed variants of the hyperscalers: AWS EKS, Azure AKS, or Google GKE – they require the least operational effort and provide the best integration. For on-prem or edge use cases (in Lübeck, for example, with industrial/maritime customers), Rancher RKE2 or K3s are suitable. We would avoid self-managed kubeadm clusters without a dedicated K8s engineer.