Your cloud infrastructure can scale in real time with your application without making a configuration change or writing a line of code. Autoscaling is the process of increasing or decreasing the capacity of application workloads without human intervention. When tuned correctly, autoscaling can reduce costs and engineering toil in maintaining the applications.
The overall process of enabling autoscaling is simple. It begins with determining the set of metrics that can provide an indicator for when Kubernetes should scale the application capacity. Next, a set of rules determines whether the application should be scaled up or down. Finally, using the Kubernetes APIs, the resources available to the application are expanded or contracted to accommodate the work that the application must perform.