Renovate in Kubernetes: OOM, Hashicorp Downloads, and the 6GB Container
Originally published at woitzik.dev Disclosure: This post contains Amazon affiliate links (marked with *). If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link gear I actually own and use daily. Renovate is the dependency update bot that keeps my k3s cluster current, and it's the "auto-update" half of the operating model that decides what gets merged…
Renovate is a dependency update bot that maintains Kubernetes clusters. It periodically checks for new container images, Helm chart versions, and Terraform provider releases, opening Pull Requests on GitHub as needed. For two weeks, Renovate failed silently on every run. The first issue was an invalid preset in the renovate.json file, causing config validation errors and clean exits.
The second problem was an Out of Memory (OOM) error at 512Mi memory limit, as the container limit was insufficient for the bot's runtime and dependencies. The third issue was a silent failure during Terraform provider download checks, consuming 6GB of memory. To address these issues, memory limits were increased to 1Gi and 6Gi, respectively, and concurrent requests to the Terraform Registry were limited to 2.
A post-run check was added to verify that Renovate actually performed updates, preventing silent failures from going unnoticed.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
