Learn Kubernetes Weekly issue 137

Warmup Pods with Istio, LLM Load Balancing at Scale, Balancing Capacity and Cost, When VPA Goes Rogue, Cost-Aware Scheduler

25 Jun 2025

This newsletter is brought to you by Fairwinds — expert-led, fully managed Kubernetes that frees your engineers from infrastructure headaches and puts you on the fast track to production-grade success.

  1. Warmup Your Pods Using Istio

    Frédéric Gaudet

    In this article, you'll learn how the BlaBlaCar team leveraged the new Istio load balancing warmup feature to decrease pods' latency during rollout phases.

  2. In-House Kubernetes vs. Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service

    Spending more time managing Kubernetes than building your product?

    You're not alone.

    Explore the pros and cons of "build vs. buy" to find the right fit for your team.

    sponsored

  3. LLM Load Balancing at Scale: Consistent Hashing with Bounded Loads

    Nick Stogner

    KubeAI replaces kube-proxy's random routing with CHWBL (Consistent Hashing with Bounded Loads), aligning LLM requests with prefix-aware cache locality to reduce TTFT by 95% and double throughput in multi-replica vLLM setups.

  4. Balancing Capacity and Cost for Kubernetes Clusters

    Denilson Nastacio

    Learn how balancing cluster cost and capacity requires addressing hidden constraints (e.g. limits, compute/storage, etc.) and properly configuring workload resources to avoid waste and instability, instead of reactive fixes like node reboots.

  5. When VerticalPodAutoscaler Goes Rogue: How an Autoscaler Took Down Our Cluster

    Thibault JAMET

    Learn how a misconfigured Vertical Pod Autoscaler caused cluster instability by evicting critical pods.

    The lesson learned: proper configuration and monitoring of resource requests/limits are essential to prevent such autoscaling failures.

  6. Building a Cost-Aware Kubernetes Scheduler

    David Masselink

    This article details a custom Kubernetes scheduler plugin that delays or reroutes pods based on real-time carbon intensity, energy pricing, and hardware power efficiency.

Articles worth checking out:

Kubernetes Best Practices in 2025

A strong cloud native foundation starts with Kubernetes done right.

Avoid pitfalls, implement smart policies, and unlock the full value of Kubernetes with these best practices.

Kubernetes Best Practices in 2025
  1. Container Network Interface (CNI) in Kubernetes: An Introduction

    Homayoon Alimohammadi

    This tutorial explains the full lifecycle of Kubernetes pod networking using CNI, from initial pod sandbox creation to static routing between nodes.

  2. Is Your Kubernetes Infrastructure Resilient? Test It with a Chaos Day

    We've all felt it—that gut-drop when an app crashes and no one knows why.

    In today's always-on world, downtime hurts. Want resilient Kubernetes?

    Try a Chaos Day.

    sponsored

  3. Understanding Kubernetes Probes: A Conversation on Ensuring Service Reliability

    Naresh Waswani

    This article dissects how to use Kubernetes liveness, readiness, and startup probes correctly, with real-world APIs, failure patterns, and probe configs for services with Redis, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and external dependencies.

  4. Scaling gRPC with Kubernetes (using Go)

    This article shows how to overcome gRPC's sticky connection issue on Kubernetes using headless services, round-robin client-side load balancing, and dynamic DNS discovery in Go.

  5. Improve Performance of Memory-Intensive Applications on EKS Cluster Using Huge Pages

    Shubham Jain

    This guide shows how to boost memory-bound workload performance in EKS by configuring huge pages on Karpenter-provisioned nodes.

    It reduces TLB misses and memory fragmentation by pre-allocating large memory blocks.

    • Software Engineer with Jobgether

    • Salary: $120K to $155K a year

    • Location: remote from the United States

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, SQL, Javascript, Typescript, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL

    • Test Automation Engineer with HavocAI

    • Salary: $100K to $130K a year

    • Location: remote from the United States

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Docker, Go, Shell, Python, Javascript, Jenkins, GitHub Actions

    • Software Engineer with NVIDIA

    • Salary: $148K to $287.5K a year

    • Location: based in the office in Santa Clara, CA, USA

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, Azure, On-premise, Helm, Go, Python, Javascript, Grafana, Prometheus

    • DevOps Engineer with Agiloft

    • Salary: $170K to $190K a year

    • Location: remote from the United States

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Shell, Python, Ruby, Terraform, Jenkins

    • Infrastructure Architect with Abnormal AI

    • Salary: €131.8K to €155K a year

    • Location: remote from the United States

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, Azure, Docker, Python, Javascript, Powershell, ARM templates, Terraform, Splunk

Discover more Kubernetes jobs on Kube Careers →

  1. fairwindsops/rbac-manager

    RBAC Manager is an operator that supports declarative configuration for RBAC with new custom resources.

    Instead of managing role bindings or service accounts directly, you can specify the desired state and RBAC Manager will make the necessary changes.

  2. cyberark/kubeletctl

    Kubeletctl is a command line tool that implements kubelet's API and can:

    • Run any kubelet API call.
    • Scan for nodes exposing the kubelet API.
    • Run a command on all the available containers by kubelet simultaneously.

    And more.

  3. Kubeconfig Operator

    klaudworks

    The Kubeconfig Operator generates restricted kubeconfig files with granular permissions for Kubernetes clusters.

    Define specific RBAC rules at cluster and namespace levels, set expiration times, and automatically manage service accounts.

  4. MetalLB

    MetalLB is a tool that provides a load-balancer implementation for bare metal Kubernetes clusters using standard routing protocols.

  5. Grafana dashboards

    This repository contains a modern set of Grafana dashboards for Kubernetes.

Other interesting projects:

Upcoming Kubernetes events

  1. Jun

    26

    Advanced Kubernetes course

    Online workshop organized by Learnk8s.

    • This is a virtual event

    • This event requires an entrance fee

  2. Jul

    3

    Kubernetes Community Days Utrecht 2025

    Online conference organized by KCD Utrecht.

    • This is a virtual event

    • This event requires an entrance fee

  3. Jun

    26

    PlatformCon Day New York

    In-person conference organized by Platform Engineering.

    • Location: New York, NY, USA

    • This event requires an entrance fee

  4. Jun

    30

    Code Europe

    In-person conference organized by Code Europe.

    • Location: Krakow, PL

    • This event requires an entrance fee

      • Use 25% off to get KUBE25

  5. Jun

    25

    #cTENcf Santa Catarina

    In-person social event organized by Cloud Native Santa Catarina.

    • Location: Florianópolis, BR

    • This is a free event.

Discover more Kubernetes events on Kube Events →

Kubernetes Call for Papers

  1. 1

    days

    Kubernetes Community Days Porto 2025

    The Call For Paper is open until 30 June 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: Porto, PT

    • In-person conference organized by KCD Porto.

    • The conference starts on the 4 November 2025.

    • Apply here
  2. 36

    days

    Kubernetes Community Days Sri Lanka 2025

    The Call For Paper is open until 4 August 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: Colombo, LK

    • In-person conference organized by KCD Sri Lanka.

    • The conference starts on the 26 October 2025.

    • Apply here
  3. 7

    days

    Kubernetes Community Days El Salvador

    The Call For Paper is open until 7 July 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: San Salvador, SV

    • In-person conference organized by KCD El Salvador.

    • The conference starts on the 20 September 2025.

    • Apply here
  4. 35

    days

    Texas Linux Festival 2025

    The Call For Paper is open until 3 August 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: Austin, TX, USA

    • In-person conference organized by TXLF.

    • The conference starts on the 4 October 2025.

    • Apply here
  5. 36

    days

    Open Source Summit Japan 2025

    The Call For Paper is open until 4 August 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: Tokyo, JP

    • In-person conference organized by Linux Foundation.

    • The conference starts on the 10 December 2025.

    • Apply here
  6. expired

    Devopsdays Lima

    The Call For Paper was open until 28 June 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: Lima, PE

    • In-person conference organized by Devopsdays.

    • The conference starts on the 20 August 2025.

    • Apply here
  7. 48

    days

    Devopsdays Detroit

    The Call For Paper is open until 16 August 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: Detroit, MI, USA

    • In-person conference organized by Devopsdays.

    • The conference starts on the 22 October 2025.

    • Apply here
  8. 32

    days

    PWNEDCR 0x8

    The Call For Paper is open until 31 July 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: San José, CR

    • In-person conference organized by DC11506.

    • The conference starts on the 19 October 2025.

    • Apply here
  9. 78

    days

    Devopsdays Bogotá

    The Call For Paper is open until 16 September 2025 at UTC. More info →
    • Location: Bogotá, CO

    • In-person conference organized by Devopsdays.

    • The conference starts on the 14 October 2025.

    • Apply here

Until next time!

— Dan

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