Learn Kubernetes Weekly issue 175 · 18 Mar 2026

Cost-Aware Scheduling, Scaling with VPA, Service Mesh Patterns, Fixing ZFS ARC Slowness, Developing on Raspberry Pi

This issue is brought to you by vCluster — join the free livestream on March 19 to learn how to enforce policies across multi-tenant Kubernetes at scale.

This Thursday, I'm presenting "Enforcing Policies Across Multi-Tenant Kubernetes at Scale"!

You can join me live (and ask questions!). vCluster will also share the link of the recording, so you are sorted either way :)

See you on Thursday!

— Dan

Articles

  1. Advanced cost-aware Kubernetes scheduling for multi-cluster cost optimization with custom metrics

    medium.com

    This article explains how to build cost-aware Kubernetes scheduling using custom metrics such as spot-interruption risk, data gravity score, and compute cost to optimize workload placement across multi-cluster environments.

  2. System Design Series: Scaling your Kubernetes workloads with VPA (And the architecture of VPA — Recommender, Updater and AdmissionController)

    medium.com

    This article explains how the Vertical Pod Autoscaler automatically adjusts pod CPU and memory by analyzing usage patterns through its three components:

    • Recommender
    • Updater
    • Admission Controller

  3. Service Mesh Patterns: The Invisible Network That Makes Microservices Work

    medium.com

    This article explains service mesh patterns for managing microservice communication, covering how sidecars like Envoy handle retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, and load balancing transparently.

  4. Troubleshooting Conan ZFS GitHub ARC Container Initialization slowness

    daversomethingsomething.medium.com

    This case study debugs 30+ second GitHub ARC workflow pod startup delays caused by mixing nodeName with OpenEBS allowedTopologies constraints, resolving it by enabling ACTIONS_RUNNER_USE_KUBE_SCHEDULER to use nodeAffinity instead.

  5. Developing on Raspberry Pi

    medium.com

    This article shows how to build a home Kubernetes cluster using Raspberry Pi hardware as a cost-effective alternative to cloud services for development and learning.

Multi-Tenancy March: When Kubernetes Policies Break Down

Discover how policy enforcement breaks down in multi-tenant Kubernetes — exceptions that leak, rules that drift, and what you're trading off at every step.

Live this Thursday with Kyverno, CEL, and real war stories at 8:00 AM PT.

→ Save your spot

Multi-Tenancy March: When Kubernetes Policies Break Down

Tutorials

  1. Hosting and scaling EKS hybrid nodes with KubeVirt and Kube-OVN CNI

    itnext.io

    This tutorial shows how to automate the EKS hybrid node lifecycle using KubeVirt VirtualMachinePools on bare metal with Kube-OVN CNI, providing direct physical network connectivity without NAT and enabling kubectl-based scaling of on-premises EKS nodes.

  2. Mastering GKE Multi-Tenancy: The Power of Namespaces, RBAC, and Quotas

    immrbhattarai.medium.com

    This tutorial teaches how to implement multi-tenancy on Google Kubernetes Engine using namespaces for isolation, RBAC for access control, and resource quotas for capacity management.

  3. Moving Logic Out of Pods: Extending the Argo Workflows Controller

    hackernoon.com

    This tutorial shows you how to extend Argo Workflows using Executor Plugins by building HTTP servers that handle lightweight tasks in reusable agent pods instead of spinning up separate pods for each step.

How We Cut Build Debugging Time by 75% with AI

Build failures in Kubernetes CI/CD pipelines are a silent productivity killer. Developers spend 45+ minutes scrolling through cryptic logs, often just hitting rerun and hoping for the best.

Ron Matsliah, DevOps engineer at Next Insurance, built an AI-powered assistant that cut build debugging time by 75% — not as a dashboard, but delivered directly in Slack where developers already work.

In this episode:

  • Why combining deterministic rules with AI produces better results than letting an LLM guess alone
  • How correlating Kubernetes events with build logs catches spot instance terminations that produce misleading errors
  • Why integrating into existing workflows and building feedback loops from day one drove adoption
  • The prompt engineering lessons learned from testing with real production data instead of synthetic examples

The takeaway: simple rules plus rich context consistently outperform complex AI queries on their own.

How We Cut Build Debugging Time by 75% with AI

Kubernetes jobs

    • Data Engineer with CoreWeave Europe

    • Salary: US$130.5K to US$407K a year

    • Location: based in the office in London, GB

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, Kubernetes, GPU-enabled compute, Compute, AWS EC2, AWS, Google Compute Engine, GCP, alerting, alerts

    • Data Engineer with CoreWeave Europe

    • Salary: US$54K to US$484K a year

    • Location: based in the office in London, GB

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, Kubernetes, GPU-enabled compute, Compute, Serverless, AWS, Azure, Virtual Machines, Google Compute Engine, GCP

    • Platform Engineer with CoreWeave Europe

    • Salary: US$87.75K to US$605K a year

    • Location: based in the office (and remote from home) in London, GB

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, Kubernetes, GPU-enabled compute, AWS, Google Compute Engine, Kubeflow, Airflow, Temporal, Ray, Athena

    • Software Engineer with Topstep

    • Salary: $175K to $210K a year

    • Location: remote from

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, Kubernetes, EKS, AWS, Docker, performance tuning, alerting, monitoring, Distributed Tracing, metrics

    • Test Automation Engineer with ZENVIA

    • Salary: $16.2K to $52.8K a year

    • Location: remote from

    • Tech stack: Kubernetes, Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, Kafka, GitHub, AWS IAM, AI tools, MLOps, GENAI

Discover more Kubernetes jobs on Kube Careers →

Code & tools

  1. Zeropod: scale to zero

    github.com/ctrox

    zeropod is a tool that automatically checkpoints containers to disk after a certain amount of time of the last TCP connection, allowing for fast and seamless scaling down to zero.

  2. K8sQuest: Kubernetes training platform

    github.com/Manoj-engineer

    K8sQuest is a local Kubernetes learning game with 50 progressive challenges where you fix broken clusters using kubectl with real-time monitoring, progressive hints, and post-mission debriefs running on kind.

  3. kimspect: container image inspector

    github.com/koithos

    kimspect is a kubectl plugin that inspects container images running in your cluster, listing them with filters for namespace, node, pod name, and registry, and providing detailed information, including image digests and versions.

  4. b4n: Kubernetes TUI

    github.com/fioletoven

    b4n is a k9s-inspired terminal UI for Kubernetes written in Rust, built on kube-rs and ratatui with full CRUD, log streaming, shell access, and port forwarding.

  5. avapigw: API Gateway for Kubernetes

    github.com/vyrodovalexey

    avapig is a high-performance, production-ready API Gateway built with Go and gin-gonic for cloud-native environments.

Other interesting projects:

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Upcoming Kubernetes events

  1. Mar

    23

    KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

    In-person conference organized by Linux Foundation.

    • Location: Amsterdam, NL

    • This event requires an entrance fee

  2. Mar

    19

    Enforcing Policies Across Multi-Tenant Kubernetes at Scale

    Online webinar organized by LearnKube + vCluster.

    • This is a virtual event

    • This is a free event.

  3. Mar

    23

    KyvernoCon EU 2026

    In-person conference organized by Nirmata.

    • Location: Amsterdam, NL

    • This event requires an entrance fee

  4. Mar

    26

    CloudFest

    In-person conference organized by CloudFest.

    • Location: Rust, DE

    • This event requires an entrance fee

  5. Mar

    26

    SRECon Americas

    In-person conference organized by Usenix.

    • Location: Seattle, WA, USA

    • This event requires an entrance fee

Discover more Kubernetes events on Kube Events →

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Kubernetes call for papers

  1. 2

    days

    Cloud Native Days Amsterdam

    The Call For Paper is open until 20 March 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • Location: Amsterdam, NL

    • In-person conference organized by Cloud Native Amsterdam.

    • The conference starts on the 22 May 2026.

    • Apply here

  2. 13

    days

    Kubernetes Community Days Czech & Slovak - Prague 2026

    The Call For Paper is open until 1 April 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • Location: Bratislava, SK

    • In-person conference organized by KCD Czech & Slovak.

    • The conference starts on the 21 May 2026.

    • Apply here

  3. 11

    days

    KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2026

    The Call For Paper is open until 29 March 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • Location: Yokohama, JP

    • In-person conference organized by Linux Foundation.

    • The conference starts on the 30 July 2026.

    • Apply here

  4. 62

    days

    Kubernetes Community Days Lima 2026

    The Call For Paper is open until 19 May 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • Location: Lima, PE

    • In-person conference organized by KCD Lima, Perú.

    • The conference starts on the 18 July 2026.

    • Apply here

  5. 7

    days

    Kubernetes Community Days New York 2026

    The Call For Paper is open until 25 March 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • Location: New York, NY, USA

    • In-person conference organized by KCD New York.

    • The conference starts on the 10 June 2026.

    • Apply here

  6. 46

    days

    KubeCon China 2026

    The Call For Paper is open until 3 May 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • Location: Shanghai, CN

    • In-person conference organized by CNCF.

    • The conference starts on the 9 September 2026.

    • Apply here

  7. 5

    days

    Cloud Native 2026

    The Call For Paper is open until 23 March 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • This is a virtual event

    • Online conference organized by Conf42.

    • The conference starts on the 23 April 2026.

    • Apply here

  8. 34

    days

    SREday Munich 2026

    The Call For Paper is open until 21 April 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • Location: Munich, DE

    • In-person conference organized by SREday.

    • The conference starts on the 15 May 2026.

    • Apply here

  9. 25

    days

    SREday Austin 2026

    The Call For Paper is open until 12 April 2026 at UTC. More info →

    • Location: Austin, TX, USA

    • In-person conference organized by SREday.

    • The conference starts on the 6 May 2026.

    • Apply here

Until next time!

— Gulcan

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