This episode is sponsored by LearnKube - get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training https://learnkube.com/training

"It's quite easy to pay more than necessary because you pay for allocated or provisioned infrastructure."

Pedro Ignácio shares a two-path approach for Kubernetes cost optimization: application-level optimization before deployment combined with observability solutions to track actual resource usage. His team optimizes applications pre-production, then uses observability to understand real consumption and adjust deployments based on data rather than assumptions.



Watch the full interview: https://ku.bz/515x11H-T

This interview is a reaction to Marc Campora's episode https://ku.bz/5gMTkzLhV

This interview is brought to you by StormForge — automate Kubernetes rightsizing with machine learning. Smarter limits, less waste, better performance. https://ku.bz/X7ls6SKmr

"Leverage as much of Kubernetes as you can."

Gari Singh shares his advice for building internal developer platforms on Kubernetes. He emphasizes treating platforms as products with lifecycles, leveraging Kubernetes primitives rather than rebuilding plumbing, and finding the right balance between centralized control and self-service flexibility.



Watch the full interview: https://ku.bz/F_t6Y2dxz

This is a reaction to Michael Levan's episode https://ku.bz/qlZPfM-zr

This interview is brought to you by Akamai Cloud — build and deliver low-latency, edge native applications on the world's most distributed cloud computing platform https://ku.bz/42RG6y4c9a

Kubernetes without observability is "on the verge of pointless."

When 50 engineers at KubeCon were asked what they'd install first on a blank cluster, the answers split between GitOps and observability. Itiel Shwartz isn't surprised by observability — but GitOps making the list caught him off guard. With so many moving pieces in Kubernetes, understanding what's happening comes before everything else.

His pick? An observability tool, every time.



Watch the full interview: https://ku.bz/b9bDXQ_xq

This interview is brought to you by Komodor — the autonomous AI SRE platform for Kubernetes https://ku.bz/Nph924Pd9

Grzegorz Głąb, Kubernetes Engineer at Cloud Kitchens, explains how accumulated pods can negatively impact cluster health.

He describes implementing a simple but effective solution for managing succeeded and evicted pods that were causing ETCD growth and increased API server load. By creating a periodic screening mechanism that removes pods in succeeded phase or those evicted by node pressure after 15 minutes, his team improved cluster stability and reduced user confusion when viewing workloads.

Watch the full episode: https://kube.fmhttps://ku.bz/yg_fkP0LN

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube - get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training https://learnkube.com/training

Shyam Jeedigunta, Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), explains the security challenges and solutions for onboarding Kubernetes nodes from different infrastructure providers.

He discusses how to handle identity management, certificate issuance, and trust establishment when nodes come from edge locations, on-premises infrastructure, or other cloud providers rather than the same infrastructure as the control plane.

Watch the full interview: https://ku.bz/m89tLbgcq

Alessandro Pomponio, Research Software Engineer @ IBM Research, explains the operational challenges of managing large bare-metal clusters for scientific teams.

Alessandro details specific problems his team encountered: GPU resource monopolization through interactive pods, large batch jobs overwhelming GPU nodes due to Kubernetes scheduler behavior, and users creating pods with commands like sleep infinity to use them as unofficial VMs.

Watch the full episode: https://ku.bz/5sK7BFZ-8

This episode is brought to you by Testkube—the ultimate Continuous Testing Platform for Cloud Native applications. Scale fast, test continuously, and ship confidently https://ku.bz/lnxYK3s0L

"I don't want to see AI agents autonomously control clusters right now."

Nick Eberts draws a clear line: AI assistants are valuable for read-only troubleshooting — giving hints, explaining what's wrong. But making changes? That should go through pull requests and human review, especially in a GitOps workflow. He also flags an emerging challenge: securing agent-to-agent communication between MCP servers and clients, and extending Istio authorization policies into the agent layer.

The takeaway: AI should assist, not act — until the guardrails catch up.



Watch the full interview: https://ku.bz/G1QSYQTn2

This interview is a reaction to Mai Nishitani's episode https://ku.bz/3hWvQjXxp

This interview is brought to you by @googlecloud - build, deploy, and scale Kubernetes workloads with Google Kubernetes Engine https://ku.bz/Rx_8kyJrb

Andrew Hillier, Co-founder CTO @ Densify, discusses the ongoing debate around setting CPU limits in Kubernetes and shares practical insights from customer deployments.

He explains why many organizations are moving away from CPU limits in environments with abundant CPU resources, arguing that premature throttling often provides no benefit when nodes rarely reach capacity.

Watch the full interview: https://ku.bz/-0wmZX03V

📕 We published a book on optimising and right-sizing GPUs in Kubernetes.

Most GPU clusters show 100% allocation and single-digit actual usage.

The book helps you:

- Tell whether your GPUs are actually computing or just allocated
- Pick the right metrics instead of trusting nvidia-smi
- Choose between time-slicing, MIG, and dedicated GPUs based on real data
- Stop GPU waste from cascading into CPU and memory waste

Download it for free here: ku.bz/KL4jRvsL4

This book was made possible by Kubex.

Paul Butler, founder at Jamsocket, discusses the "happy path" for using Kubernetes resources effectively.

He recommends focusing on fundamental resources: Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, and CronJobs.

These resources provide a practical foundation for running workloads in Kubernetes without getting overwhelmed by the platform's complexity.

The advice stems from his experience building Jamsocket and represents what he wished he knew when starting with Kubernetes.

Watch the full episode: https://ku.bz/Dmn93dd7M

"The supply chain has become the sharp end of the wedge."

Andrew Martin traces the evolution of software supply chain attacks from boot sector viruses to modern npm-borne worms. His team signs everything, generates SBOMs, and verifies Cosign artifacts at admission time into Kubernetes clusters.

The prediction for 2026: continuous validation of supply chain security metadata at runtime will become a staple in Kubernetes security tooling this year.



Watch the full interview: https://ku.bz/wyMlWGTqf

This interview is brought to you by StormForge — automate Kubernetes rightsizing with machine learning. Smarter limits, less waste, better performance. https://ku.bz/X7ls6SKmr

Zbyněk Roubalík, Founder & CTO @ Kedify, explains what sets Kedify apart from other autoscaling solutions in the market.

Rather than treating autoscaling as a single-dimensional problem, Kedify's approach recognizes that effective cost optimization and performance improvement on Kubernetes requires coordinated scaling across multiple layers of the infrastructure stack.

Watch the interview: https://ku.bz/qN7BLcYTK

Read the announcement: https://ku.bz/0XVsNHSnK

Karpenter can rotate your nodes for three reasons: they're underutilized, they're empty, or the AMI has drifted from what you specified.

You can set a disruption budget for each reason to control how many nodes rotate at once. But here's the catch: if you only set budgets for two reasons and skip the third, Karpenter doesn't disable it. It silently applies a default 10% budget to any reason you didn't mention.

Adhi Sutandi's team found this the hard way — drift events fired during maintenance windows they thought were locked down. The fix? Set a single budget of one node with no reason qualifier, so it applies to everything.



New episode out now: https://ku.bz/XyVfsSQPr