Why Your Pod Died (OOMKilled): The Difference Between CPU and Memory Limits
I used to think CPU and memory were the same. Not literally, of course. I knew one was for processing and one was for… well, memory. But when it came to Kubernetes resource limits, I treated them identically. Set a request, set a limit, let the scheduler do its thing. If the app needs more, it uses more, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong. And I learned this lesson at 2 AM on a Tuesday, when our primary API service went from “healthy” to CrashLoopBackOff in about 30 seconds. No warning. No graceful degradation. Just… dead. Then alive. Then dead again. ...