In a Kubernetes cluster, CPU and memory requests are both a cost dial and a reliability dial. They’re how you tell the scheduler what a pod “needs,” and they’re what node autoscalers and horizontal pod autoscalers (HPAs) react to when deciding whether to add capacity or replicas.
The problem is that requests drift. They get set during early development or a past traffic shape, then workloads evolve, and the numbers don’t. Nobody wants to hand-tune requests forever, but a cost tool rewriting resources at the wrong time can be worse….
