Kubernetes Autoscaling

This post is sponsored by Cast AI , but comes from my real world experiences. Automatically scaling nodes is a cloud parlor trick you don’t get to opt out of. If you run in a hyperscaler you have to play by their rules weather you need it or not. Is it useful? Sometimes. Is it required? Yes, to make the economics make sense. Is it cool? Absolutely. Cloud pricing makes static provisioning expensive, so you’re forced to dynamically scale. But autoscaling introduces problems you didn’t have on-prem. Then you spend years turning knobs to make the problems managable. I’ve seen many engineers lose months tuning autoscaling when they should be contributing to business initiatives. The company and engineer moved from a static, on-prem environment and the thing that used to be extremely difficult — adding and removing compute capacity — is now trivial and fun. So they tune the knobs until they get it just right. Six months later all of their assumptions were wrong and they either do it again,…