Kubernetes is actually using the memory. Just checked one master node, fresh cluster running nothing, it is sitting at 950 MB used with another 800 MB in buffer

Kubernetes is actually using the memory. Just checked one master node, fresh cluster running nothing, it is sitting at 950 MB used with another 800 MB in buffers. Usage will jump quite a bit higher when running anything. Very important thing to know about memory: Kubernetes nodes have no swap. Kubernetes will refuse to install if the system has a swap, gotta remove it. This means nodes better have a safe margin of memory, because there is no swap to use when under memory pressure (things will crash). Hence the minimum requirement of 2 GB. I tried to run complete clusters with 5+ machines in VmWare, with as little memory as possible because I don't have that much ram on my desktop, and all I got was virtual machines crashing under memory pressure.