Announcing the Brightbox Kubernetes Autoscaler

Today I’m really pleased to announce the Brightbox Kubernetes Autoscaler. With this enabled, your Kubernetes cluster can grow and shrink its own cloud server capacity in response to demand. It’s a simple as configuring the maximum number of servers you want to build and scaling up your Deployments:

$ kubectl -n example scale --replicas=4 deployment/hello-world
deployment.apps/hello-world scaled

$ kubectl -n example get pods -o wide
NAME                           READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE     IP               NODE        NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
hello-world-5f48c6bb68-drw4n   1/1     Running   0          10m     192.168.146.71   srv-hrgv1   <none>           <none>
hello-world-5f48c6bb68-fxtnc   1/1     Running   0          2m10s   192.168.146.72   srv-hrgv1   <none>           <none>
hello-world-5f48c6bb68-c2mjx   0/1     Pending   0          4s      <none>           <none>      <none>           <none>
hello-world-5f48c6bb68-qrv2h   0/1     Pending   0          4s      <none>           <none>      <none>           <none>

$ kubectl -n example get pods -o wide
NAME                           READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE     IP               NODE        NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
hello-world-5f48c6bb68-drw4n   1/1     Running   0          15m     192.168.146.71   srv-hrgv1   <none>           <none>
hello-world-5f48c6bb68-fxtnc   1/1     Running   0          7m4s    192.168.146.72   srv-hrgv1   <none>           <none>
hello-world-5f48c6bb68-c2mjx   1/1     Running   0          4m58s   192.168.102.1    srv-e4isv   <none>           <none>
hello-world-5f48c6bb68-qrv2h   1/1     Running   0          4m58s   192.168.102.2    srv-e4isv   <none>           <none>

When new pods need scheduling but there isn’t the capacity, they go into Pending state and the autoscaler builds new servers using our API, adds them to the cluster, and the pods get deployed to them. Magic!

When they’re done with and the deployment is scaled down, the autoscaler notices the empty servers and removes them from the cluster. So you just pay for the server time you need.

There is a full guide on how to set this up here, and we’ve also written a blog post diving into the technical details of how it all works behind the scenes.

Try Brightbox for free

If you want to play with Kubernetes autoscaling, you can sign up for Brightbox in just a couple of minutes and use your £50 free credit to give it a go.

Managed Kubernetes services

If instead you want us to run Kubernetes for you, or anything else for that matter, we offer hands-on support and managed services too. Drop us a line.