Top 5 Kubernetes Scaling Mistakes That Will Break Your Cluster:
-
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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.
