When deploying an application to Kubernetes, each container in a pod should define CPU and memory requests and limits. It is commonly understood how requests affect the scheduling of your pod and the future pods in the same node.

But outside scheduling, the way requests and limits impact your running application is more confusing and less commonly known. Are requests only used at scheduling time? How will limits affect my application latency? How do you select a good value for requests and limits?

In this hands-on workshop, you will be using an example demo application, deployed to your own Kubernetes cluster, to help clarify some misconceptions about requests and limits, including how requests are used beyond scheduling and how both requests and limits can impact the performance and reliability of your application. You will gather relevant metrics from your cluster and application, then use relevant Datadog visualizations to understand those effects, minimize them, and, depending on your goals, identify good values for both requests and limits.