1. Node Group Sizing Fewer large nodes vs. many small ones. Textbooks don't cover this. We ran 10 nodes, 32 CPU each. Seemed efficient. Problem: One node dies, 320 CPU worth of workloads need to reschedule. Cluster autoscaler couldn't handle it. Pods sat pending for 10 minutes. We switched to 20 nodes, 16 CPU each. Same total capacity. One node dies now? 160 CPU to reschedule. Autoscaler catches it in 90 seconds. Scheduling is tighter, but failures are isolated. Cost stayed th...