Autoscaling Containers... with Math

Docker and Kubernetes provides delightful APIs to show various statuses of our applications. From CPU, Load average, HTTP response times, etc. we all have what we need to make sure our app is running …

Docker and Kubernetes provides delightful APIs to show various statuses of our applications. From CPU, Load average, HTTP response times, etc. we all have what we need to make sure our app is running healthily. When things are on fire, we Ops people twiddle some knobs like spin up more Pods to keep things going. We use mostly our experience and knowledge of the systems that we are running to know what to do. However, if you look at everyday things like your airconditioners and thermostats, they don’t have an Ops team that gets paged to set the correct level of the coolant to set your room to the right temperature. They use some math behind called Control Theory to keep your room’s temperature stable. In this talk, I will show how we can use the same concepts to autoscale and manage the health of our applications on Kubernetes.