DevOps Glossary

Kubernetes Resource Requests and Limits are per-container settings that tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory a workload needs and the maximum it can use. A request is the amount Kubernetes uses when scheduling a Pod onto a node, such as cpu: 500m or memory: 256Mi. A limit is the runtime cap, such as cpu: 1 or memory: 512Mi. If a container exceeds its memory limit, Kubernetes can terminate it with an out-of-memory error; if it exceeds its CPU limit, it is throttled. Teams use requests and limits to improve bin packing, reduce noisy-neighbor problems, control cost, and make Kubernetes infrastructure management more predictable, but values set too low can cause throttling or crashes, while values set too high can waste cluster capacity.