Cloud-Native Microservices With Kubernetes - 2nd Edition

CPU Resource Units in Kubernetes

CPU resources in Kubernetes are measured in CPU units, where 1 CPU equals one vCPU or core on cloud providers, and one hyperthread on a bare-metal Intel processor.

For example, if a container requests 100m, it’s guaranteed 0.1 CPU (that is, 10% of a single core) on the node it runs on. A container requesting 1 gets one full CPU core reserved for it.

You can express CPU values interchangeably as millicpu or decimal fractions:

• 100m is the same as 0.1
• 10m is the same as 0.01
• 1000m is the same as 1

The following two configurations are equivalent:

Using millicpu notation:

resources:
  requests:
    cpu