Why Kubernetes autoscalers keep fighting each other (and why the solution must be autonomous)
Scored daily by a customisable AI persona to surface the most relevant engineering leadership news.
Deep dive into Kubernetes autoscaler conflicts, highly relevant to cloud infrastructure.
Kubernetes autoscalers (HPA, VPA, KEDA, Karpenter) create contradictory scaling decisions because they act concurrently on the same mutable state, violating the Unix philosophy's sequential composition model. This causes specific failure modes: VPA shrinking pod CPU requests inflates HPA's utilization metric, triggering a death spiral of microscopic pods, while KEDA's queue-based scaling conflicts with HPA's CPU-based logic, and GitOps engines like Argo CD reset live changes. The solution requires an autonomous agent that treats workload capacity as a single coupled equation rather than relying on isolated, conflicting control loops.