Following its migration from vanilla instances with autoscaling groups to Kubernetes, Postmates began facing challenges while “migrating workloads that needed to scale up very quickly.”

The built-in Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) automatically scales the number of pods in a replication controller, deployment or replica set based on observed CPU utilization. But the challenges for Postmates is that there’s no way to configure the scale velocity of one particular cluster with an HPA.

For Postmates, which runs at least three different types of applications with distinct performance and scaling characteristics, this proved problematic.

To overcome these challenges, the team created and open sourced the Configurable Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, which allows for fine-grained tuning on a per-HPA object basis. The result is that “you can configure critical services to scale down very slowly, while every other service could be configured to scale down instantly to reduce costs.”