The Reality of Kubernetes
Kubernetes is powerful but complex. Before adopting it, ensure your team has the bandwidth to learn and maintain it.
Resource Requests and Limits
Always set both requests and limits. Without them, a single pod can starve other workloads on the same node.
resources:
requests:
memory: "128Mi"
cpu: "250m"
limits:
memory: "256Mi"
cpu: "500m"
Health Probes
Configure liveness and readiness probes carefully. A misconfigured liveness probe can cause infinite restart loops under high load.
What I Wish I'd Known
- Start with managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS)
- Use Helm for managing releases
- Invest in monitoring from day one (Prometheus + Grafana)