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Kubernetes–What is the difference between resource requests and limits?

In Kubernetes it is a best practice to configure resource limits for your containers. VSCode will even warn you if it couldn’t detect resource limits in your manifest files:

Setting resource limits prevents a container consuming too much resources and impacting other workloads. By setting limits, pods will be terminated by Kubernetes when their limits are exceeded. This helps in keeping the cluster healthy and stable.

The most common resources to specify are CPU and memory, but others exists.

Here is a short example on how to configure this at the container level:

In the example above, the CPU usage is limited to 250m or  250 milliCPU (1/4th of a vCPU/Core) and memory usage is limited to 512Mi or 512MiB.

Next to resource limits, it is also possible to configure resource requests. Setting a resource request indicates the amount of that resource that you expect the container will use. Kubernetes will use this information when determining which node to schedule the pod on.

A node will be ineligible to host a new container if the sum of the workload requests, including the new container’s request, exceeds the available capacity. This remains the case even if the real-time memory use is actually very low.  This is the reason why it is best to keep the requests values as low as possible and setting the limits as high as possible(without bringing other workloads into trouble). Using a low resource request value gives your pods the best chance of getting scheduled to a node.

Limits are also configured in the resource section of your manifest file:

More information: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/manage-resources-containers/

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