Hands-On Microservices with Kubernetes

Scaling microservices

There are two aspects to scaling a microservice with Kubernetes. The first aspect is scaling the number of pods backing up a particular microservice. The second aspect is the total capacity of the cluster. You can easily scale a microservice explicitly by updating the number of replicas of a deployment, but that requires constant vigilance on your part. For services that have large variations in the volume of requests they handle over long periods (for example, business hours versus off hours or week days versus weekends), it might take a lot of effort. Kubernetes provides horizontal pod autoscaling, which is based on CPU, memory, or custom metrics, and can scale your service up and down automatically.

Here is how to ...