Scaling Mistakes | Kubernetes

Top 5 Kubernetes Scaling Mistakes That Will Break Your Cluster: Only Using Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) • HPA scales pods, but what if your nodes are full? Your pods won’t scale at all! • Solution: Combine HPA with Cluster Autoscaler to scale nodes dynamically. Not Using Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) • Are the pods using too many or too few resources? Your cluster is bleeding money. • Solution: Enable VPA to adjust pod CPU & memory requests automatically. Ignoring Load Balancer & Traffic Distribution • Scaling pods without a smart traffic strategy leads to overloaded instances. • Solution: Use Ingress controllers (NGINX, Traefik) + Service Mesh (Istio, Linkerd) to balance traffic. Using Default Node Sizes & Spot Instances Without Planning • Spot instances disappear anytime, and your pods go down with them. • Solution: Use multiple node pools (On-Demand + Spot) for better reliability. No Scaling Policies for Stateful Workloads • Databases don’t scale like stateless apps. If your PostgreSQL pod scales incorrectly, you’ll corrupt data. • Solution: Use StatefulSets with proper read/write strategies to avoid downtime.

Mar 11, 2025 - 06:10

Top 5 Kubernetes Scaling Mistakes That Will Break Your Cluster:

Only Using Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)
• HPA scales pods, but what if your nodes are full? Your pods won’t scale at all!
• Solution: Combine HPA with Cluster Autoscaler to scale nodes dynamically.
Not Using Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)
• Are the pods using too many or too few resources? Your cluster is bleeding money.
• Solution: Enable VPA to adjust pod CPU & memory requests automatically.
Ignoring Load Balancer & Traffic Distribution
• Scaling pods without a smart traffic strategy leads to overloaded instances.
• Solution: Use Ingress controllers (NGINX, Traefik) + Service Mesh (Istio, Linkerd) to balance traffic.
Using Default Node Sizes & Spot Instances Without Planning
• Spot instances disappear anytime, and your pods go down with them.
• Solution: Use multiple node pools (On-Demand + Spot) for better reliability.
No Scaling Policies for Stateful Workloads
• Databases don’t scale like stateless apps. If your PostgreSQL pod scales incorrectly, you’ll corrupt data.
• Solution: Use StatefulSets with proper read/write strategies to avoid downtime.