Kubernetes 1.35 Removes the Restart Tax — Why Stateful Workloads Just Got Easier to Operate

Kubernetes 1.35 in-place pod resize graduates to stable — and with it, six years of a hidden operational tax on stateful workloads comes to an end. If a container needed more CPU or memory, the only safe answer was a restart. That design made sense for stateless services. It was painful for everything else. Increase memory on a JVM service and the JIT cache disappears. Resize a PostgreSQL pod and WAL replay starts again from the last checkpoint. Restart Redis and your cache warm-up becomes a production event that ripples across dependent services. Restart a Kafka broker and partition rebalancing begins — consuming cluster bandwidth while your application waits. Because of that reality, most platform teams quietly shelved one of Kubernetes' most promising automation tools: Vertical Pod Autoscaler. VPA could recommend resource changes with reasonable accuracy. Actually applying them was a different calculation entirely. In production, the restart cost was often higher than the resource i