What now?

We explored the simplest way to scale our Deployments and StatefulSets. It's simple because the mechanism is baked into Kubernetes. All we had to do is define a HorizontalPodAutoscaler with target memory and CPU. While this method for auto-scaling is commonly used, it is often not sufficient. Not all applications increase memory or CPU usage when under stress. Even when they do, those two metrics might not be enough.

In one of the following chapters, we'll explore how to extend HorizontalPodAutoscaler to use a custom source of metrics. For now, we'll destroy what we created, and we'll start the next chapter fresh.

If you are planning to keep the cluster running, please execute the commands that follow to remove the resources we created.

 1  # If NOT GKE or AKS
 2  helm delete metrics-server --purge
 3
 4  kubectl delete ns go-demo-5

Otherwise, please delete the whole cluster if you created it only for the purpose of this book and you're not planning to dive into the next chapter right away.

Before you leave, you might want to go over the main points of this chapter.

• HorizontalPodAutoscaler's only function is to automatically scale the number of Pods in a Deployment, a StatefulSet, or a few other types of resources. It accomplishes that by observing CPU and memory consumption of the Pods and acting when they reach pre-defined thresholds.
• Metrics Server collects information about used resources (memory and CPU) of nodes and Pods.
• Metrics Server periodically fetches metrics from Kubeletes running on the nodes.
• If the number of replicas is static and you have no intention to scale (or de-scale) your application over time, set replicas as part of your Deployment or StatefulSet definition. If, on the other hand, you plan to change the number of replicas based on memory, CPU, or other metrics, use HorizontalPodAutoscaler resource instead.
• If replicas is defined for a Deployment, it will be used every time we apply a definition. If we change the definition by removing replicas, the Deployment will think that we want to have one, instead of the number of replicas we had before. But, if we never specify the number of replicas, they will be entirely controlled by HPA.
• If you plan to use HPA with a Deployment or a StatefulSet, do NOT declare replicas. If you do, each rolling update will cancel the effect of the HPA for a while. Define replicas only for the resources that are NOT used in conjunction with HPA.