[nebster]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I'm pretty sure CPU limits will only limit the amount of CPU used even if there is more available. It will not kill off the pod.

Memory limits however will kill the pod if the pod uses more than the limit.

[jrockway]

It is possible to get into this state. CPU starvation can be so severe that containers start failing their liveness probes and are killed. This is obviously very different than things like memory limits where the kernel OOMKills you, but will look similar to the untrained observer. Their app is serving 503s and the containers are in a restart loop -- looks like a Kubernetes problem.

In general, the problem is that people don't understand how these complex systems interact -- what do limits do, what are the consequences of limits, how do you decide on correct limits, what do liveness and readiness probes do, what is the kubelet's role in the probes, wait what's a kubelet, etc.

[rsanders]

That may be more likely with limits, but it doesn’t require a limit. I’ve had lots of fun with that in Elasticsearch pods with no limit. And then you get to enjoy a nice cascading failure.