CPU Limits Don't Kill Pods - The #1 Kubernetes Misunderstanding
I keep seeing the same debugging rabbit hole. A team adds CPU limits, latency gets weird, and the first question is: “Are pods getting killed?” Usually no. That’s memory behavior, not CPU behavior. CPU limits do not kill pods. They throttle them. That one distinction explains a lot of “everything looks fine but users are complaining” incidents. The Misunderstanding A lot of engineers assume this mapping: Memory limit exceeded → pod gets killed (OOMKill) ✅ CPU limit exceeded → pod gets killed ❌ The second one is the trap. The official Kubernetes documentation spells it out: ...