Autoscaler Delayed Reaction to Load Decrease

The autoscaler was slow to scale down after a drop in traffic, causing resource wastage.

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What Happened

After a traffic drop, the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) did not scale down quickly enough, leading to resource wastage.

Diagnosis Steps

1Checked autoscaler logs and observed that it was still running extra pods even after traffic had reduced significantly.
2Resource metrics indicated that there were idle pods consuming CPU and memory unnecessarily.

Root Cause

HPA configuration was not tuned to respond quickly enough to a traffic decrease.

Fix/Workaround

• Reduced the cooldown period in the HPA configuration to make it more responsive to traffic decreases.
• Set resource limits to better reflect current traffic levels.

Lessons Learned

Autoscalers should be configured with sensitivity to both traffic increases and decreases.

How to Avoid

1Tune HPA with shorter cooldown periods for faster scaling adjustments during both traffic surges and drops.
2Monitor traffic trends and adjust scaling policies accordingly.

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