Comment by ozim
1 day ago
People have it backwards.
If you have an app and you want to run a single app yeah silly to look for K8s.
If you have a beefy server or two you want to utilize fully and put as many apps on it without clashing dependencies you want to use K8s or docker or other containers. Where K8s enables you to go further.
Why would you want to use K8s for one or two beefy servers? It's designed for solving a different problem at a large scale.
I think automatic scaling is useful to utilize server fully - apps that don't need resources automatically scale down, apps that need resources can auto scale up.
I bet you can do it in some other way but that's built in feature of k8s.
There is very little reason to need auto-scaling when you run on pre-purchased VMs/servers. You've paid for all the compute so you can run as many replicas as it can fit and you need to handle the projected amount of traffic.
There are no benefits to scaling down in this case. And scaling up won't help handle more load if you've already allocated all resources to running replicas. You need more machines, not more replicas on the existing machine(s).
It all comes down to simple, boring capacity planning and static resource allocation. Fewer moving parts results in fewer failure modes, hence more robust infra and less ops and maintenance work.
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