Using in-tree storage drivers can lead to support being dropped for Kubernetes v1.26 and should be replaced with Container Storage Interface (CSI) to ensure compatibility and future-proofing. Lack of Pod Disruption Budgets can cause applications to become unavailable due to evictions, while unrealistic budgets that prevent any pod movement can block node lifecycle activities like patching or bin packing low-utilization nodes. Isolating workloads without strong requirements for it can lead to performance and availability issues, as well as cost inefficiencies. Mixing competing placement constructs such as NodeAffinity and NodeSelectors can cause configuration errors and inconsistencies. Not having observability in place can make troubleshooting difficult, while using burstable instances to reduce cloud costs can often be more expensive than expected. Excessive cross-AZ traffic can increase cloud bills unexpectedly. Not setting resource requests for applications can lead to CPU throttling and OOM kills. Failing to expose application health status through Liveness and Readiness probes can make it difficult to diagnose issues. Scaling workload replicas manually can be wasteful and fragile, while running a self-hosted Kubernetes control plane can be unnecessary and costly. Not using namespaces or keeping everything in the "default" namespace can lead to performance and maintenance issues. Failing to add wildcardable tolerations to vital DaemonSets can cause blind spots in logging coverage. Running business logic in DaemonSets is often not necessary and can lead to outages. Applications unable to terminate gracefully in a short time window can create cascading issues and increase mental overhead.