Autoscale a Deployment in Kubernetes

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Autoscale a Deployment in Kubernetes

The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler is a great way to automatically scale Kubernetes applications in response to demands in real time. In this lab, you will have the opportunity to practice your skills with the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler by autoscaling an existing Deployment. This will give you some hands-on experience with autoscaling applications in Kubernetes.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 23, 2025

Duration

30m

Challenge

Configure Resource Requests for the Deployment

The plantzone Deployment is in the default namespace. Add a resource request to the Deployment's Pod template so that the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler will have a baseline for app's expected CPU usage. Each Pod is expected to use around 50m CPU under normal conditions.

You can find a Deployment manifest for the plantzone Deployment at /home/cloud_user/plantzone.yml.
Challenge

Create an HPA to Autoscale the Deployment

Create a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler to automatically scale the plantzone Deployment. Make sure there is always a minimum of 2 replicas, with the ability to scale up to a maximum of 8 replicas. The target percentage for CPU utilization should be 50.
Challenge

Simulate a Burst of CPU Load and Observe the Autoscaling Behavior
You can create load by making a specialized HTTP request to any of the Deployment's Pods. There is a NodePort service in place to make it easy to reach these Pods. You can communicate with the Service using port 30080 on the lab server node, localhost:30080.

This command will generate approximately 250m CPU load for 2 minutes:
```
curl localhost:30080/ConsumeCPU -d "millicores=250&durationSec=120"
```
After generating the load, observe the behavior of the autoscaler. It should scale the Deployment up. Then, about 5 minutes after the CPU load goes way, it should scale back down.

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