Hands-On Microservices with Kubernetes

Understanding the Kubernetes metrics server

The Kubernetes metric server is a modern replacement for Heapster and cAdvisor. It implements the metrics API and provides the nodes and pods metrics. Those metrics are used by the various autoscalers and by the Kubernetes scheduler itself when dealing with best effort scenarios. Depending on your Kubernetes distribution, the metrics server may or may not be installed. If you need to install it, you can use helm. For example, on AWS EKS, you have to install the metrics server yourself using the following command (you can choose any namespace):

helm install stable/metrics-server \ --name metrics-server \ --version 2.0.4 \ --namespace kube-system

Typically, you don't interact with the metrics server ...