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The basics of horizontal Node and vertical Pod auto-scaling

Auto-Scaling in Shoot Clusters

There are three auto-scaling scenarios of relevance in Kubernetes clusters in general and Gardener shoot clusters in particular:

  • Horizontal node auto-scaling, i.e., dynamically adding and removing worker nodes.
  • Horizontal pod auto-scaling, i.e., dynamically adding and removing pod replicas.
  • Vertical pod auto-scaling, i.e., dynamically raising or shrinking the resource requests/limits of pods.

This document provides an overview of these scenarios and how the respective auto-scaling components can be enabled and configured. For more details, please see our pod auto-scaling best practices.

Horizontal Node Auto-Scaling

Every shoot cluster that has at least one worker pool with minimum < maximum nodes configuration will get a cluster-autoscaler deployment. Gardener is leveraging the upstream community Kubernetes cluster-autoscaler component. We have forked it to gardener/autoscaler so that it supports the way how Gardener manages the worker nodes (leveraging gardener/machine-controller-manager). However, we have not touched the logic how it performs auto-scaling decisions. Consequently, please refer to the official documentation for this component.

The Shoot API allows to configure a few flags of the cluster-autoscaler:

There are general options for cluster-autoscaler, and these values will be used for all worker groups except for those overwriting them. Additionally, there are some cluster-autoscaler flags to be set per worker pool. They override any general value such as those specified in the general flags above.

Only some cluster-autoscaler flags can be configured per worker pool, and is limited by NodeGroupAutoscalingOptions of the upstream community Kubernetes repository. This list can be found here.

Horizontal Pod Auto-Scaling

This functionality (HPA) is a standard functionality of any Kubernetes cluster (implemented as part of the kube-controller-manager that all Kubernetes clusters have). It is always enabled.

The Shoot API allows to configure most of the flags of the horizontal-pod-autoscaler.

Vertical Pod Auto-Scaling

This form of auto-scaling (VPA) is enabled by default, but it can be switched off in the Shoot by setting .spec.kubernetes.verticalPodAutoscaler.enabled=false in case you deploy your own VPA into your cluster (having more than one VPA on the same set of pods will lead to issues, eventually).

Gardener is leveraging the upstream community Kubernetes vertical-pod-autoscaler. If enabled, Gardener will deploy it as part of the control plane into the seed cluster. It will also be used for the vertical autoscaling of Gardener's system components deployed into the kube-system namespace of shoot clusters, for example, kube-proxy or metrics-server.

You might want to refer to the official documentation for this component to get more information how to use it.

The Shoot API allows to configure a few flags of the vertical-pod-autoscaler.

⚠️ Please note that if you disable VPA, the related CustomResourceDefinitions (ours and yours) will remain in your shoot cluster (whether someone acts on them or not). You can delete these CustomResourceDefinitions yourself using kubectl delete crd if you want to get rid of them (in case you statically size all resources, which we do not recommend).

Pod Auto-Scaling Best Practices

Please continue reading our pod auto-scaling best practices for more details and recommendations.