Delayed Scaling Response to Traffic Spike

Scaling took too long to respond during a traffic spike, leading to degraded service.

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What Happened

Traffic surged unexpectedly, but the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) was slow to scale up, leading to service delays.

Diagnosis Steps

1Reviewed HPA logs and found that the scaling threshold was too high for the initial traffic spike.
2Found that scaling policies were tuned for slower load increases, not sudden spikes.

Root Cause

Autoscaling thresholds were not tuned for quick response during traffic bursts.

Fix/Workaround

• Lowered scaling thresholds to trigger scaling faster.
• Used burst metrics for quicker scaling decisions.

Lessons Learned

Autoscaling policies should be tuned for fast responses to sudden traffic spikes.

How to Avoid