Kubernetes is built to scale—but how do you prove it? Whether optimizing for cost or deploying at hyper-scale, benchmarking is crucial to understanding where your clusters thrive and where they break. Enter Kube-burner and Cluster Loader 2, two powerful tools designed to push Kubernetes to its limits and expose performance bottlenecks before your users do.

But with great power comes complexity. How do you design meaningful benchmarks? What metrics truly matter? And how do you simulate real-world workloads without misleading results? This talk explores how Kube-burner and Cluster Loader 2 generate large-scale workloads, measure stress-induced performance, and uncover cluster-tuning insights. You'll learn best practices, pitfalls, and how to turn raw numbers into optimizations. Whether you're an SRE, platform engineer, or Kubernetes enthusiast, this session will help you set baselines, break limits, and push Kubernetes to its true potential.