Open Source Summit North America 2022

Application autoscaling refers to the operation of automatically adjusting the number of running application containers to meet the traffic demand. In the current K8S design, each application container runs inside its dedicated runtime environment POD. Scaling the application containers means creating/deleting more PODs which results in high latency and slow response. This talk presents a new approach to support application autoscaling. Rather than spawning a new pod, the new approach replicates one or more new application containers inside an existing Kubernetes POD and automatically adjusts the resource boundary of the POD. This avoids the cold startup latency associated with creating a new POD, thus greatly increasing the scaling speed. We will share how we enhance Kubernetes Vertical POD Autoscaler to support this new approach.