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This is something that has been bothering me for the last couple of years. I consistently work with developers who no longer care about performance issues, assuming that k8s and the ops team will take care of it by adding more CPU or RAM or just restarting. What happened to writing reliable code that performed well?

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Business incentives. It's a classic incentive tension between more time on nicer code that does the same thing or building more features. Code expands to it's performance budget and all.

At least on backend you can quantify the cost fairly easily. If you bring it up to your business people they will notice easy win and then push the devs to make more efficient code.

If it's a small $$ difference although, the devs are probably prioritizing correctly.

I've witnessed the same thing, however there is nothing mutually exclusive about having performant code running in Kubernetes. There's a trade-off between performance and productivity, and maintaining a sense of pragmatism is a good skill to have (that's directed towards those that use scaling up/out as a reason for being lax about performance).

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