Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration. But its enterprise adoption reveals pitfalls that official documentation doesn't mention. This article is a condensed view of the most costly errors we've encountered — and fixed — at our clients.
Most common mistakes
No resource requests/limits: without defined limits, a pod can consume all resources on a node and impact other workloads. This is the #1 cause of production instability. No Pod Disruption Budgets: without PDBs, a node drain (update, scaling) can stop all pods of a service simultaneously. Misconfigured liveness probes: an overly aggressive liveness probe can kill healthy pods under load, creating a cascade effect.
EKS vs GKE vs AKS: how to choose
Our experience across all 3 managed Kubernetes: EKS (AWS) is the most flexible but most complex to configure. Ideal if you're already on AWS with a mature DevOps team. GKE (Google) offers the best out-of-the-box experience, with Autopilot significantly simplifying operations. The default choice if starting from scratch. AKS (Azure) is the best choice if your company is in the Microsoft ecosystem. The free control plane makes it the most economical for small clusters.
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About the author
AM
Alexandre MARTIN
Lead Architect, ACCENSEO
AWS and Azure certified cloud architect with 12 years of experience. Alexandre helps enterprises design and migrate to resilient distributed architectures.
