Data Plane Autoscaling Overview

We’re halfway through the journey of building automatically efficient Kubernetes clusters for your workloads. In Chapter 1, we provided a brief introduction to autoscaling in the Kubernetes ecosystem. In short, autoscaling in Kubernetes is done in two ways: the first is scaling your application pods, and the second is scaling the underlying infrastructure needed to run your application pods. We’ve spent quite some time diving into the details of how to scale your application pods efficiently. Now, for the next four chapters, we’ll focus on how to automatically scale the compute capacity for your Kubernetes clusters.

First, we’ll cover what it means to scale the data plane of a Kubernetes cluster. You’ll learn why you need to take action and dive into the details to gain a complete view of autoscaling in Kubernetes. Even though the data plane autoscaling concept is basic, you will then learn about the different...