A guide on scaling out your Kubernetes pods with the Watermark Pod Autoscaler

Overprovisioning Kubernetes workloads can provide stability during the launch of new products, but proper resource provisioning and autoscaling play crucial roles in keeping costs down and helping the product respond to traffic spikes. The Watermark Pod Autoscaler (WPA) is an open-source tool that extends the built-in Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), allowing for more flexibility by introducing high and low watermarks for scaling decisions and more fine-grained control over autoscaling behavior. Proper provisioning principles, such as sizing pods correctly, vertical and horizontal provisioning, and determining if autoscaling is right for your workload, are essential before implementing the WPA. Choosing a metric, setting up the autoscaler using tools like Terraform, monitoring and alerting, and continuous tuning of the autoscaler are also important steps in optimizing Kubernetes workloads with the WPA.