What is Autoscaling?

What is Autoscaling?

• A. A pattern to facilitate automatic scaling of infrastructure or application components
• B. A manual process to scale resources
• C. A fixed resource allocation
• D. A monitoring technique

Answer: (A)

Autoscaling means automatically adjusting the number of running instances or the resources allocated to them based on observed demand, so the system scales up when traffic rises and scales down when it falls, without human intervention. In Kubernetes this is implemented by components like Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for pods, Vertical Pod Autoscaler for resource requests, and Cluster Autoscaler for nodes, which monitor metrics (such as CPU or custom metrics) and trigger scaling actions. This is different from manual scaling (done by a person), fixed resource allocation (which never changes), or just monitoring (which only observes but doesn’t automatically adjust).

Autoscaling means automatically adjusting the number of running instances or the resources allocated to them based on observed demand, so the system scales up when traffic rises and scales down when it falls, without human intervention. In Kubernetes this is implemented by components like Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for pods, Vertical Pod Autoscaler for resource requests, and Cluster Autoscaler for nodes, which monitor metrics (such as CPU or custom metrics) and trigger scaling actions. This is different from manual scaling (done by a person), fixed resource allocation (which never changes), or just monitoring (which only observes but doesn’t automatically adjust).