Last week we built an understanding of how Kubernetes reserves resources on a node. This week we’ll look at how cloud providers configure the resource reservations for their Kubernetes offerings.

Surprised that you can’t fit as many pods on a node as you thought? Wondering why a node with 32 GiB of memory can’t hold four 8 GiB pods? It turns out that there’s a lot more to the story of how Kubernetes allocates resources. In this post, you’ll learn how resources are allocated and how to use that to plan your cluster.

Developers usually want to be able to directly connect to a system, start the debugger, and step their way through the code. Being able to log into a machine and debug is the way most of us learn to troubleshoot and fix issues. But what if you can’t do that? And what if I told you there’s a better way to debug?

In the past, ARC has a feature that enabled it to change the minimum number of runners based on a schedule: ScheduledOverrides. When ARC was modernized, this feature was not included in the new version. This isn’t an oversight. Instead, it’s a recognition that Kubernetes has a built-in feature that can handle this task: CronJob. Learn how to use the CronJob resources to change the settings for ARC scale sets on a schedule.

Actions Runner Controller (ARC) is a powerful way to manage ephemeral, self-hosted GitHub runners. If you’re considering ARC or starting to deploy it, there are five key things to know if you want to be successful using it.