Kubernetes Academy

Tuning Karpenter for workloads with spiky traffic

April 23, 2026

5 MIN READ

Karpenter does a great job in environments where traffic is predictable. It watches for unschedulable pods and provisions nodes to fit them. In spiky environments, that model starts to show cracks. Pods arrive in bursts, capacity is not there yet, and every second of delay translates directly into user-facing latency […]

By Ido Slonimsky
Tech Lead, Zesty

Why stateful workloads are often the biggest scaling bottleneck in K8s

March 26, 2026

4 MIN READ

Kubernetes was built for elasticity.With modern autoscaling tools like Karpenter and Cluster Autoscaler, clusters can spin up new nodes in seconds to handle traffic spikes. But in many environments, scaling still feels slower than expected. The reason is often the same: Stateful workloads. Databases, message brokers, and search engines frequently […]

By Ilya Pisatzkov
Solution Architect

Using Karpenter and still overpaying?

March 12, 2026

5 MIN READ

Karpenter has become the autoscaler of choice for many Kubernetes platform teams, and for good reason. It provisions nodes in real time, selects efficient instance types, consolidates underutilized capacity, and removes much of the operational burden associated with traditional node groups. On paper, the value proposition is compelling: the right […]

By Zesty Team

How to avoid costly instance selection mistakes in Karpenter

February 19, 2026

5 MIN READ

Your Karpenter configuration can make or break your cluster’s efficiency. Configure it poorly and you risk locking yourself into expensive nodes that never consolidate. I have seen clusters where Karpenter was installed correctly, yet costs increased, and the root cause was almost always the same: NodePool design. The key is […]

By Ido Slonimsky
Tech Lead, Zesty

Why “Accurate Requests” Still Lead to Cloud Resource Waste

January 29, 2026

6 MIN READ

If you’re operating Kubernetes in production, you probably know this story: you analyze metrics, tune CPU and memory requests, validate them against historical data, and roll changes out carefully. And even though pods are no longer wildly overprovisioned, the cloud bill stays pretty much the same. If that’s familiar, it’s […]

By Ido Slonimsky
Tech Lead, Zesty

The Top 3 Base Image Choices for Kubernetes Pods

January 22, 2026

6 MIN READ

Picking a base image for your pods is one of the most crucial decisions for your cluster’s performance. We all know that a fast pod startup in Kubernetes depends heavily on image size. Large images take longer to download and unpack, and slow down rollouts, scaling events, and recovery from […]