How to deal with workloads HPA can’t handle

HPA has become one of the most relied-upon tools in Kubernetes operations, mostly due to its ability to cover many common scaling event use cases. However, there are workloads even HPA can’t help. A DaemonSet that claims resources on every node with no ability to scale. A Postgres primary in a StatefulSet, which does not support multiple primary replicas. A batch Job that spikes unpredictably and HPA has no bearing over. These cases expose the limits of replica-based scaling, reminding us that Kubernetes has more workload patterns than HPA was ever meant to address. This article breaks down why HPA falls short in […]

By Ilan Ovadia
R&D Team Lead

How to Configure Karpenter for Scalable, Cost-Efficient EKS Clusters

Karpenter has become the de facto choice for Kubernetes teams that need intelligent, dynamic scaling on AWS. It automates how compute capacity is provisioned and retired, ensuring workloads always have the resources they need without waste. Yet, configuring Karpenter the right way for your environment is challenging, so it keeps your clusters performant, reliable, and cost-effective. This guide walks through the core concepts and best practices for configuring Karpenter, with clear examples and checkpoints you can follow directly in your environment. Understand the Context Before You Configure Before diving into YAML files, it’s important to understand how Karpenter fits within your existing […]

By Ido Slonimsky
Tech Lead, Zesty

Best practices for upgrading EKS clusters with Karpenter

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) makes running Kubernetes a much smoother experience, but upgrading an EKS cluster can be anything but smooth. An upgrade touches both the control plane (the brain of your cluster) and the data plane (the worker nodes actually running workloads). Each component can break things if not handled properly. Karpenter, the open-source cluster autoscaler, brings efficiency to node provisioning and scaling. But because it directly interacts with your workloads and AWS infrastructure, any EKS version change can affect how Karpenter behaves. The reality: upgrading is unavoidable, but with the right plan you can do it without breaking […]

By Omer Hamerman
Principal DevOps Engineer

How to secure Kubernetes workloads using Pod Identity

When running workloads in Kubernetes, applications often need to interact with external cloud services - like pulling data from an S3 bucket. Traditionally, this meant hardcoding secrets or access keys into pods, which is risky, hard to rotate, and painful to manage at scale. In short, the old approach tied application identity directly to long-lived secrets, which doesn’t scale well and introduces security risks. Pod Identity solves this by giving pods a secure, temporary identity without relying on static credentials. What is Pod Identity? Pod Identity is a way to connect Kubernetes Service Accounts with cloud provider identities (like AWS IAM Roles). […]

By Ilya Pisatzkov
Solution Architect

How to Achieve Lightning-Fast Scaling with Smarter HPA Tuning

The Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) automatically adjusts the number of pods in a workload according to demand, based on observed resource usage, such as CPU, memory, or custom metrics. While it is a powerful mechanism, the typical configuration observed in the wild often reacts too slowly to steep load spikes. This lag can lead to degraded performance or even downtime. Our goal is to share practical, battle-tested strategies to make HPA react faster without introducing instability or excessive costs. The focus is on actionable configurations you can implement right away. Understanding the HPA Evaluation Delay The 15-second HPA sync period […]

By Isaac Dorfman
Tech Lead

Optimizing Kubernetes image sizes for faster scaling

One Kubernetes challenge developers often face is the impact of image sizes on scaling speeds. The larger your container images, the longer it takes to pull them from the registry, leading to delays in scaling applications. As we scale up and down to meet demand, this delay can drastically impact our SLA and overall cost of our infrastructure. The purpose of this guide is to give you practical tips that can make your scaling process faster and smoother. We’ll walk through how image size impacts scaling time, why faster scaling is essential for SLA compliance, and how you can optimize your […]

By Isaac Dorfman
Tech Lead