How to fix Too many pods in Kubernetes

View the node's pod limits and current allocation:

# Check allocatable pods
kubectl get node <node-name> -o jsonpath='{.status.allocatable.pods}'

# Count current pods on node
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces --field-selector spec.nodeName=<node-name> | wc -l

# Detailed view
kubectl describe node <node-name> | grep -A5 "Allocated resources"

The simplest solution is horizontal scaling—add more nodes:

# GKE
gcloud container clusters resize <cluster> --num-nodes=5

# EKS
aws eks update-nodegroup-config --cluster-name <cluster> \
  --nodegroup-name <ng> --scaling-config desiredSize=5

# AKS
az aks scale --resource-group <rg> --name <cluster> --node-count 5

Larger instances support more pods due to more network interfaces and IPs:

| AWS Instance | Max Pods (VPC CNI) |
|--------------|-------------------|
| t3.micro | 4 |
| t3.medium | 17 |
| m5.large | 29 |
| m5.xlarge | 58 |

Replace node groups with larger instance types for better pod density.

If resources allow, increase the kubelet maxPods setting:

# Edit kubelet config (location varies by setup)
sudo vim /var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml

Add or modify:

maxPods: 150

Then restart kubelet:

sudo systemctl restart kubelet

Note: This doesn't help if IP exhaustion is the actual limit.

For EKS, enable prefix delegation to dramatically increase IP capacity:

kubectl set env daemonset aws-node -n kube-system \
  ENABLE_PREFIX_DELEGATION=true

This assigns /28 IP prefixes instead of individual IPs, increasing capacity from ~29 to 110+ pods on m5.large instances.