Request Multiple Quotes from Container Orchestration Providers and Vendors

The challenge

The solution

The outcome

Requirements

• 1. Define business goals, scope, and success metrics.
• 2. Inventory applications, dependencies, and suitability for containerization.
• 3. Classify workloads by criticality, latency, compliance, and statefulness.
• 4. Choose container platform standards (base images, runtimes, registries).
• 5. Select orchestration platform and target deployment model.
• 6. Design container image build, scan, sign, and promotion pipeline.
• 7. Establish network, service discovery, ingress, and traffic policies.
• 8. Define storage, persistence, backup, and disaster recovery patterns.
• 9. Implement identity, secrets, RBAC, and least-privilege access.
• 10. Set resource requests/limits, scheduling rules, and autoscaling policies.
• 11. Build observability for logs, metrics, traces, alerting, and SLOs.
• 12. Create CI/CD and GitOps workflows with versioning and rollback.
• 13. Standardize configuration management across environments.
• 14. Plan multi-environment strategy: dev, test, staging, prod.
• 15. Address security, vulnerability management, patching, and supply chain controls.
• 16. Define governance, policy enforcement, and compliance requirements.
• 17. Prepare migration waves, modernization approach, and decommissioning plan.
• 18. Validate disaster recovery, failover, and operational runbooks.
• 19. Train operations, development, and security teams.
• 20. Continuously review cost, performance, reliability, and platform usage.

Best practices

• 1. Define clear business and technical requirements before evaluating vendors.
• 2. Prioritize compatibility with your existing cloud, on-prem, and hybrid infrastructure.
• 3. Verify support for major orchestration standards and portability across environments.
• 4. Assess security features, including RBAC, secrets management, image scanning, and policy enforcement.
• 5. Ensure strong compliance support for your industry’s regulations and audit needs.
• 6. Evaluate scalability and performance under real production workloads.
• 7. Check for mature lifecycle management: provisioning, upgrades, patching, and rollback.
• 8. Require centralized observability for logs, metrics, traces, and alerting.
• 9. Confirm integration with CI/CD, DevOps, ITSM, and identity providers.
• 10. Review vendor support quality, SLAs, and availability of enterprise-grade professional services.
• 11. Analyze total cost of ownership, including licensing, infrastructure, and operational overhead.
• 12. Test ease of use for platform teams and application teams through proofs of concept.
• 13. Validate backup, disaster recovery, and high-availability capabilities.
• 14. Confirm governance features for multi-team, multi-tenant, and policy-driven operations.
• 15. Choose solutions with a clear roadmap, strong ecosystem, and minimal vendor lock-in.