Resource Requests and Limits: CPU, Memory, QoS, and OOMKilled Debugging

Calendar February 22, 2026
Kubernetes
Intermediate
Resource-Sizing, Oomkilled-Debugging, Capacity-Planning
Resources, Cpu, Memory, Qos, Oomkilled, Limits, Requests
Kubectl, Vertical-Pod-Autoscaler

Resource Requests and Limits#

Requests and limits control how Kubernetes schedules pods and enforces resource usage. Getting them wrong leads to pods that get evicted, throttled to a crawl, or that starve other workloads on the same node.

Requests vs Limits#

Requests are what the scheduler uses for placement. When you request 500m CPU and 256Mi memory, Kubernetes finds a node with that much allocatable capacity. The request is a guarantee – the kubelet reserves those resources for your container.