Kubernetes’ native Vertical Pod Autoscaler was designed to simplify resource management, but today’s highly dynamic, microservice-driven environments expose fundamental limitations in how VPA works. In this technical deep-dive, Nic unpacks why VPA struggles with real-world workloads, what’s actually happening under the hood, and how ScaleOps delivers the automation and accuracy teams expect but rarely get from VPA.
In this video, Nic breaks down:
- The architectural flaw in VPA’s P90-based logic and why it consistently leads to under-provisioning.
- How histogram decay delays adaptation for days, making VPA reactive instead of responsive.
- Why ratio preservation hard-limits performance ceilings, even when resources are available.
- The surprising reality: 95% of VPAs run in Off mode, revealing widespread concerns about reliability and safety.
Live demo: real workloads, real failure modes
Using a microservices application, Nic demonstrates how VPA’s design leads to cascading operational issues, including:
- Throttling cascades across dependent services
- Batch job starvation during load spikes
- New-release OOMKill loops that block rollouts and destabilize deployments
ScaleOps Bridges the Gaps VPA Created
Where VPA relies on coarse historical signals, delayed decay windows, and static ratio constraints, ScaleOps provides a fully autonomous, real-time optimization platform built for modern Kubernetes workloads and production environments.
ScaleOps solves the core problems exposed in the session by delivering:
Real-time, automated cloud resource management
No waiting for decayed histograms. ScaleOps continuously manages your workloads resources based on live cluster conditions and contextual awareness, ensuring that your applications always have the exact amount of resources needed – no more, no less.
Predictive intelligence instead of reactive scaling
ScaleOps forecasts demand, prevents throttling cascades, and finally eliminates the under-provisioning that VPA’s P90 algorithm creates.
Safe, automated optimization – without Off mode
Teams keep VPA disabled because it introduces risk. ScaleOps replaces that uncertainty with guardrails, enforcement policies, and automated validation that make right-sizing safe, even for the most critical production environments.