Six months in. $800k spent. The project isn''t working. Sunk cost bias says keep going. The business case for stopping is clear. Making the engineering argument to kill a project — and knowing when you''re right — is one of the hardest senior skills.
The senior engineer proposes Kafka for the notification system. You have 500 users. The junior engineer proposes a direct function call. The senior engineer is technically correct and strategically wrong. Knowing when good architecture is overkill is the skill that separates senior from staff.
Implement zero-trust networking with Kubernetes NetworkPolicies. Learn default-deny patterns, label-based pod selection, DNS egress, multi-namespace policies, and testing with netshoot.
Master Kubernetes resource requests and limits to prevent OOMKills, CPU throttling, and cascading failures. Learn QoS classes, LimitRange, VPA, HPA, and the complete right-sizing workflow for production workloads.