Scaling Mistakes | Kubernetes

Top 5 Kubernetes Scaling Mistakes That Will Break Your Cluster:

1. Only Using Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)
   • HPA scales pods, but what if your nodes are full? Your pods won’t scale at all!
   • Solution: Combine HPA with Cluster Autoscaler to scale nodes dynamically.

2. Not Using Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)
   • Are the pods using too many or too few resources? Your cluster is bleeding money.
   • Solution: Enable VPA to adjust pod CPU & memory requests automatically.

3. Ignoring Load Balancer & Traffic Distribution
   • Scaling pods without a smart traffic strategy leads to overloaded instances.
   • Solution: Use Ingress controllers (NGINX, Traefik) + Service Mesh (Istio, Linkerd) to balance traffic.

4. Using Default Node Sizes & Spot Instances Without Planning
   • Spot instances disappear anytime, and your pods go down with them.
   • Solution: Use multiple node pools (On-Demand + Spot) for better reliability.

5. No Scaling Policies for Stateful Workloads
   • Databases don’t scale like stateless apps. If your PostgreSQL pod scales incorrectly, you’ll corrupt data.
   • Solution: Use StatefulSets with proper read/write strategies to avoid downtime.