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Tradeoff: a balance achieved between two desirable but incompatible features; a compromise. Schooling often promotes the idea that there is a right and wrong answer to questions… It does little to prepare us for how many times that there are multiple right answers and no definitive best path forward. In a time where we have unlimited information at our fingertips, you can throw a stone and hit a thousand people with an opinion.

In a previous blog post, we explained how containers’ CPU and memory requests can affect how they are scheduled. We also introduced some of the effects CPU and memory limits can have on applications, assuming that CPU limits were enforced by the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) quota. In this post, we are going to dive a bit deeper into CPU and share some general recommendations for specifying CPU requests and limits.

This blog post by Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineer Milan Plžík was originally published on the Kubernetes.io blog on Nov. 16, 2023. There’s been quite a lot of posts suggesting that not using Kubernetes resource limits might be a fairly useful thing (for example, For the Love of God, Stop Using CPU Limits on Kubernetes or Kubernetes: Make your services faster by removing CPU limits ).

This is the final article of a three-part series. To start at the beginning, read Part 1: Benefiting from multi-cluster setups requires familiarity with common variations and Part 2: Exploring the facets of a multi-cluster observability strategy. As companies scale software production, they lean on Kubernetes as a crucial container orchestration platform for managing, deploying and ensuring software availability.