<p>I am aware of the pros of having multiple containers in one pod but What are the cons of having multiple containers. We have a 20k pod prod requirement and our current infra supports max 900 pods for one namespace.which is best suitable approach to accommodate this request.</p>

Karthik Reddy
<p>I'm not a devops guy, but from developer's perspective:</p>

<p>If you have many containers in POD:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>you should be aware of: lifecycle issues - which container starts first, which ends first, and so forth</p></li>
<li><p>how to evaluate the "operability" of a pod as a logical unit. If there is one container in the pod, then its clear - if the container runs - that's ok. But if you have many, what kind of probes (readiness, liveness) do you define? What happens if one container is dead, is the whole pod still operational?</p></li>
<li><p>potentially its easier to find the place in kubernetes cluster for the replica of small pods than big ones (having many constainers and and therefor probably consuming much more resources)</p></li>
<li><p>you sacrifice the potential scalability flexibility. Say container A and B are in the same pod. What if you want to scale out only container A.</p></li>
<li><p>the same item as above applies to release management flexibility (rollout, canary releases, fallbacks to previous version - all that stuff)</p></li>
<li><p>you'll have to think about the solution of gathering logs/metrics from the containers inside the pod. This can be easy or tedious depending on the actual technology stack, but this is a point that you'll have to solve anyway. Arguably when you have multiple containers in the pod the solution might get more complicated.</p></li>
<li><p>somewhat less convenient operability with <code>kubectl</code>. Ok this is minor, but still. You'll always have to add that <code>-c</code> flag. Want to see the logs of the pod? Add <code>-c &lt;container-name&gt;</code>. Want to do <code>kubectl exec -it</code> - again, <code>-c &lt;container-name&gt;</code>. </p></li>
</ul>

<p>Of course sometimes running sidecar container is a valid case (for service mashes for example). But all-in-all its a tool for a job.</p>

<p>Interestingly, I've found <a href="https://banzaicloud.com/blog/k8s-sidecars/" rel="noreferrer">an article</a> that talks about giving side car containers a "special attitude". This can be somewhat relevant although from the question I understand that you don't consider  "side cars" if I've got you right</p>
