Kubernetes
13 posts — newest first.
-
Your Pod Uses Half Its CPU Limit and Still Gets Throttled
CPU limits are enforced per 100 ms, not per minute. A simulation of CFS throttling at 54% average use, the metric that shows it, and how to size limits.
-
gRPC vs REST: Smaller Bytes Are the Least Interesting Difference
Protobuf is smaller than JSON until you gzip it. The real gRPC trade-offs are contracts, deadlines, status codes in trailers, and load balancing on Kubernetes.
-
Liveness, Readiness, Startup: The Probe That Restarts Your Healthy Pods
Each Kubernetes probe answers a different question. Put the database in the wrong one and a 90-second blip becomes twelve restarts. A simulation and the fix.
-
Raft: How a Cluster of Machines Agrees on a Single Truth
Consensus sounds academic until etcd loses quorum and your cluster freezes. Raft explained: leader election, log replication, and why majorities are the trick.
-
Load Balancing and Health Checks: The Three States Your Checks Don't Have
Balancing decides where load goes; health checks decide where it stops. Most outages here come from a check that can't tell busy apart from broken.
-
An agent breached Hugging Face in 4.5 days. The controls that would have stopped it are boring.
Hugging Face's July 2026 postmortem is the clearest agent-intrusion writeup we have. The failures were IMDS, admission policy, and one shared credential.
-
Your cluster has GPUs. That doesn't make it AI-ready.
CNCF's Kubernetes AI Conformance program is a portability standard. Read it as a self-audit instead and it becomes a genuinely useful platform checklist.
-
The Reconciliation Loop: Why Kubernetes Self-Heals and Your Script Doesn't
Level-triggered control loops are the one idea behind Kubernetes, Terraform, GitOps, and every operator. See it once and half of platform work collapses.
-
What a Container Actually Is: Namespaces, cgroups, and Layers
A container is not a lightweight VM. It is one ordinary process with three kernel restrictions applied. Knowing which three explains almost every container bug.
-
Round-robin is malpractice for LLM traffic: what the Inference Gateway actually fixes
The Gateway API Inference Extension is GA. Why a normal Kubernetes Service balances model servers badly, and how to tell if you need an InferencePool.
-
GPU utilization is a lying metric: the unit economics of self-hosted inference
You can run a GPU at 100% utilization and waste most of it. The cost model that predicts your inference bill, and the five levers in payback order.
-
Frontier models still fail half your incidents: reading ITBench-AA like an SRE
ITBench-AA put frontier models against 59 real Kubernetes incident diagnoses — all scored below 50%. What the benchmark measures and how to use it.
-
Introduction to YAML!
YAML Ain't Markup Language — a human-readable format for configuration. The syntax, the gotchas, and why it's everywhere in infrastructure.