KubeFM

Managed Kubernetes on a major cloud provider can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month — and much of that spending hides behind defaults, minimum resource ratios, and auxiliary services you didn't ask for.
Fernando Duran, founder of SadServers, shares how his GKE Autopilot proof of concept ran close to $1,000/month on a fraction of the CPU of the actual workload and how he cut that to roughly $30/month by moving to Hetzner with Edka as a managed control plane.
In this interview:
Why Kubernetes hasn't delivered on its original promise of cost savings through bin packing — and what it actually provides instead

A real cost comparison: $1,000/month on GKE vs. $30/month on Hetzner with Edka for the same nominal capacity

What you need to bring with you (observability, logging, dashboards) when leaving a fully managed cloud provider

The decision comes down to how tightly coupled you are to cloud-specific services and whether your team can spare the cycles to manage the gaps.
Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.
More info
Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/6nSDbz9m4

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Running multiple Kubernetes clusters on AWS with the cluster autoscaler? Every four months, you face the same grind: upgrading Kubernetes versions, recreating auto scaling groups, and hoping instance type changes stick.
Adhi Sutandi, DevOps Engineer at Beekeeper by LumApps, shares how his team migrated from the cluster autoscaler to Karpenter across eight EKS clusters — and the hard lessons they learned along the way.
In this episode:
Why AWS auto scaling groups are immutable and how that creates upgrade bottlenecks at scale

How the latest AMI tag accidentally turned less critical clusters into chaos engineering environments, dropping SLOs before anyone realized Karpenter was the cause

Why pre-stop sleep hooks solved pod restartability problems that Quarkus's built-in graceful shutdown couldn't

The case for pod disruption budgets over Karpenter annotations when protecting critical workloads during node rotations

How Karpenter's implicit 10% disruption budget caught the team off guard — and the explicit configuration that fixed it

Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.
More info
Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/XyVfsSQPr

Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Migrating from ECS to Kubernetes sounds straightforward — until you hit spot capacity failures, firewall rules silently dropping traffic, and memory metrics that lie to your autoscaler.
Radosław Miernik, Head of Engineering at aleno, walks through a real production migration: what broke, what they missed, and the fixes that made it work.
In this interview:
Running Flux and Argo CD together — Flux for the infra team, Argo CD's UI for developers who don't want to touch YAML

How the wrong memory metric caused OOM errors, and why switching to jemalloc cut memory usage by 20%

Splitting WebSocket and API containers into separate deployments with independent autoscaling

Four months of migration, over 100 configuration changes in the first month, and a concrete breakdown of what platform work looks like when you can't afford downtime.
Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.
More info
Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/x6wFMhVsx

Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Kubernetes nodes on EKS can take over a minute to become ready, and pods often wait even longer — but most teams never look into why.
Jan Ludvik, Senior Staff Reliability Engineer at Outreach, shares how he cut node startup from 65 to 45 seconds and reduced P90 pod startup by 30 seconds across ~1,000 nodes — by tackling overlooked defaults and EBS bottlenecks.
In this episode:
Why Kubelet's serial image pull default quietly blocks pod startup, and how parallel pulls fix it

How EBS lazy loading can silently negate image caching in AMIs — and the critical path workaround

A Lambda-based automation that temporarily boosts EBS throughput during startup, then reverts to save cost

The kubelet metrics and logs that expose pod and node startup latenc,y most teams never monitor

Every second saved translates to faster scaling, lower AWS bills, and better end-user experience.
Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.
More info
Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/B7TzKXyxf

Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

You self-host services at home, but upgrades break things, rollbacks require SSH-ing in to kill containers manually, and there's no safety net if your hardware fails.
Thibault Martin, Director of Program Development at the Matrix Foundation, walked this exact path — from Docker Compose to Podman with Ansible to Kubernetes on a single server — and explains why each transition happened and what it solved.
In this interview:
Why Ansible's declarative promise fell short with the Podman collection, forcing sequential imperative steps instead of desired-state definitions

How community Helm charts replace the need to write and maintain every manifest yourself

Why GitOps isn't just a deployment workflow — it's a disaster recovery strategy when your infrastructure lives in your living room

How k3s removes the barrier to entry by bundling opinionated defaults so you can skip choosing CNI plugins and storage providers

Kubernetes doesn't have to be enterprise-scale — with the right distribution and community tooling, it can be a practical, low-overhead choice for anyone who cares about their data.
Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.
More info
Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/Xk5S7VqXz

Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.