Containers

I spent most of last week chasing image pull failures in a multi-tenant cluster. It turned out the problem was our private registry mirror. We were using it as a pull-through cache, but the credentials lived on the nodes. One team rotated their credentials and, a few minutes later, pods in three other namespaces started failing too. That was the moment it became obvious we had a shared-credentials problem. That sent me down the rabbit hole of CRI-O’s credential provider for registry mirrors. After setting it up, I do not really want to go back. ...

Kubernetes Is Not the Answer to Every Problem I say this as someone who spends a significant part of their work building and operating Kubernetes clusters. Kubernetes is a fantastic tool — but it’s not for everything, and introducing it at the wrong time can cause more problems than it solves. When to Use Kubernetes Many microservices (10+) that scale independently Variable load — autoscaling handles capacity automatically Multiple teams and environments — namespaces and RBAC provide clean separation High availability requirements (99.9%+ uptime) — self-healing, health checks, rolling updates Multi-cloud or hybrid strategy — Kubernetes abstracts the provider When NOT to Use Kubernetes One or two simple applications — use a VPS, Docker Compose, or managed PaaS instead Small team with no K8s experience — the learning curve takes months No CI/CD pipeline yet — build that first; Kubernetes builds on top of it Cost-sensitive project — minimum production EKS cluster costs $250-800/month Legacy stateful apps not designed for containers — significant refactoring needed Decision Framework Ask yourself: Do you have 5+ independently deployable services? Variable load needing autoscaling? K8s expertise on the team? Budget for minimum K8s costs? Containerizable services? ...