KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

We thought that changing our Kubernetes pod autoscaler seemed like a really straightforward thing to do. With relative ease, we yanked out our old custom pod autoscaler and replaced it with KEDA. We were impressed with the flexibility and control we now had in our cluster, but then discovered a set of really hard lessons that no one had anticipated. In this lightning talk, I’ll hit the highlights of secondary issues we encountered due to such a seemingly simple change, such as Docker Hub rate limits, Kubernetes metrics server failures and their exciting impact on our cluster, AWS rate limits, and late night fights with Argo CD for control of pod maximums. Lastly, I’ll share my personal favorite topic: the “Night Club Theory” of autoscaling tuning. If you or someone you love is thinking of changing your autoscaler, I recommend spending 5 minutes with me to learn the things you should be aware of before you make the switch!