What is the primary function of the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)?

Question

Accepted Answer

Adjusts the number of Pod replicas — scales out or in based on observed metrics like CPU utilization — HPA changes replica count horizontally. VPA adjusts resources vertically within a single Pod — it does not add or remove replicas.

Answer

Adjusts CPU and memory requests — right-sizes resource allocations based on historical usage patterns

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Adds or removes cluster nodes — provisions infrastructure when Pods cannot be scheduled on existing capacity

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Restarts unhealthy Pod containers — replaces failing instances based on observed health probe failures

What is the primary function of the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)?

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