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Scenario #422
Scaling & Load
Kubernetes v1.22, AWS EKS

HPA Disabled Due to Missing Resource Requests

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) failed to trigger because resource requests weren’t set.

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What Happened

HPA couldn’t scale pods up despite high traffic due to missing CPU/memory resource requests.

Diagnosis Steps
  • 1kubectl describe deployment revealed missing resources.requests.
  • 2Logs indicated HPA couldn’t fetch metrics without resource requests.
Root Cause

Missing resource request fields prevented HPA from making scaling decisions.

Fix/Workaround
• Set proper resources.requests in the deployment YAML.
Lessons Learned

Always define resource requests to enable autoscaling.

How to Avoid
  • 1Define resource requests/limits for every pod.
  • 2Enable autoscaling based on requests/limits.
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