Kubernetes Deployments

Requests tell the scheduler how much CPU and memory a pod needs to land on a node. Limits tell the kernel when to throttle or kill. Mixing them up leads to pods stuck in Pending, surprise OOMKills, or throttled latency on nodes with idle capacity. This article explains the mechanics behind both, how Kubernetes assigns QoS classes from them, and how to pick initial values that match your workload.

A well-structured Helm chart saves hours during every upgrade, review, and incident. A poorly structured one creates silent failures that only surface in production. This guide walks through the conventions that make charts portable, testable, and safe to hand to a colleague or a CI pipeline without a README longer than the chart itself.

Kompose converts your Docker Compose file to Kubernetes manifests in one command. The output looks complete, but it is missing resource limits, health probes, and proper secrets handling. This tutorial walks through the full migration path: converting with Kompose, then hardening every manifest until it is production-ready.

A rolling update replaces pods one at a time, but the defaults do not prevent dropped connections. Without the right readiness probe, preStop hook, and terminationGracePeriodSeconds, users see 502s every time you deploy. This guide walks through each setting that matters and ends with a complete, production-ready Deployment manifest.

The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler adds or removes pod replicas based on metrics you choose: CPU utilization, memory pressure, request rates from Prometheus, or external signals like queue depth. This guide walks through configuring HPA v2 for each of those scenarios, tuning the stabilization window so scaling is fast up and cautious down, and avoiding the conflict that arises when HPA and VPA target the same resource.

KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling) extends the standard HPA with 70+ built-in scalers and scale-to-zero support. Instead of scaling only on CPU and memory, you can scale pods based on Kafka consumer lag, RabbitMQ queue depth, Prometheus query results, or a cron schedule. This tutorial walks through installing KEDA, creating your first ScaledObject, configuring common scalers, and understanding the two-phase scaling model that makes zero-to-many possible.

Kustomize lets you maintain environment-specific Kubernetes manifests (dev, staging, production) by patching a shared base rather than templating it. The base files stay as valid, deployable YAML. This guide walks through the directory layout, patching strategies, generators, components, and integration with ArgoCD and Flux.

Argo CD turns a Git repository into the single source of truth for your cluster state. You commit manifests, Argo CD reconciles them. This tutorial walks through a full GitOps setup: installing Argo CD with Helm, deploying an application via the Application CRD, configuring sync policies, ordering resources with sync waves, bootstrapping a cluster with the app-of-apps pattern, handling secrets safely, and managing multiple clusters from one control plane.

A Kubernetes Job runs one or more pods to completion and then stops. A CronJob does the same thing on a cron schedule. Together they cover database migrations, nightly backups, report generation, and any other task that should run once or on a timer rather than continuously. This guide walks through both resources from a minimal Job through parallelism, failure handling, timezone-aware CronJobs, concurrency control, and cleanup.

Init containers run sequentially to completion before your application container starts. They are Kubernetes's built-in mechanism for dependency checks, database migrations, config fetching, and filesystem preparation. This guide walks through each use case with production-ready manifests, covers failure handling and debugging, and explains when the newer sidecar container pattern is a better fit.

A PodDisruptionBudget tells Kubernetes how many pods of your application can be offline simultaneously during voluntary maintenance. Without one, a single kubectl drain can evict every replica at once. This guide covers choosing between minAvailable and maxUnavailable, handling unhealthy pods, and avoiding the misconfigurations that block cluster upgrades.