Kubernetes Preheating Pods

“Preheating” in the context of Kubernetes typically refers to ensuring a number of pods are pre-started or pre-scaled before they are actually needed. This is often done to reduce the startup time of services, ensuring that the application can handle traffic spikes more efficiently by having pods “warmed up” and ready to handle requests.

There are several ways to preheat or pre-scale the number of pods in Kubernetes:

1. Manual Scaling with kubectl scale

You can manually scale the number of pods before a traffic spike or to ensure that a certain number of pods are always running. This can be done using the kubectl scale command to adjust the number of replicas.

For example, to scale the number of pods for a deployment:

kubectl scale deployment my-app --replicas=10

This will scale your my-app deployment to have 10 running pods, which ensures that the application can handle a large amount of traffic when needed.

2. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)

The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) automatically scales the number of pods based on observed CPU utilization (or other custom metrics). However, if you know that there is a traffic spike coming in the near future, you can preheat the…