1. "It works on my cluster: a tale of two troubleshooters" by Liam Mackie, Octopus Deploy.
Kubernetes has a gift for making simple problems look complicated, and complicated problems look simple. When something breaks, you often see symptoms completely unrelated to the real cause of the problem. This leads to a problem I like to call “blaming the network team”, where problems end up being diagnosed by the wrong engineers for a given issue. [..] I’ve personally experienced this dichotomy during my time as an engineer, working on both software and infrastructure, so I’m going to tell a story from two perspectives.
2. "A Brief Deep-Dive into Attacking and Defending Kubernetes" by Alexis Obeng.
My main motivation for writing this was to better understand for myself how Kubernetes works and its attack surface. I was also inspired from talking to people in the field and realizing just how prominent Kubernetes is in corporate environments. Although I did not cover every single attack vector here, I still cover a large amount of topics in the hope that this will prove useful to others seeking to understand Kubernetes’ attack surface.
3. "Exploring Cloud Native projects in CNCF Sandbox. Part 5: 13 arrivals of January 2025" by Dmitry Shurupov, Palark.
Learn about the following new CNCF projects: Podman Container Tools and Podman Desktop, bootc, composefs, k0s, KubeFleet, SpinKube, container2wasm, Runme Notebooks for DevOps, SlimFaas, Tokenetes, CloudNativePG, and Drasi.
4. "The Real State of Helm Chart Reliability: Hidden Risks in 100+ Open‑Source Charts" by Prequel.
Prequel's reliability research team audited 105 popular Kubernetes Helm charts to reveal missing reliability safeguards. The average score was ~3.98/10. 48% (50 charts) rated "High Risk" (score ≤3/10). Only 17% (18 charts) were rated "Reliable" (≥7/10).
5. "Reclaiming underutilized GPUs in Kubernetes using scheduler plugins" by Lalit Somavarapha, Gernot Seidler, Srujana Reddy Attunuri (HPE).
The default Kubernetes preemption mechanism (DefaultPreemption) can evict lower-priority pods to make room for higher-priority ones. But it only considers priority — not actual utilization. Pods are treated equivalently from a preemption perspective when they share the same priority, regardless of their current utilization. We evaluated several existing approaches.
6. "How We Built Our Deployment Pipeline: GitOps, ArgoCD, and Kubernetes at Dodo Payments" by Ayush Agarwal, Dodo Payments.
The investment in GitOps pays off at a certain scale. Below that scale, simpler solutions work fine. For us, running a payment platform with strict requirements around security, auditability, and reliability — GitOps isn’t optional. It’s infrastructure.
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