--- title: Ever Had HPA Scale Out Your Workload While One Pod Is... description: A discussion raises a common but hard-to-spot Kubernetes issue: HPA scaling out replicas while traffic remains pinned to a single hot pod due to persistent... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ever-had-hpa-scale-out-your-workload-while-one-pod-is-still-doing-most-of-the-work--hxxrxgpnl twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Ever Had HPA Scale Out Your Workload While One Pod Is Still Doing Most of the Work? | daily.dev og:description: A discussion raises a common but hard-to-spot Kubernetes issue: HPA scaling out replicas while traffic remains pinned to a single hot pod due to persistent... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ever-had-hpa-scale-out-your-workload-while-one-pod-is-still-doing-most-of-the-work--hxxrxgpnl og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/hXxRxGPnL.png og:image:alt: Ever Had HPA Scale Out Your Workload While One Pod Is Still Doing Most of the Work? og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Ever Had HPA Scale Out Your Workload While One Pod Is Still Doing Most of the Work? **[DevOps Daily](https://daily.dev/sources/devopsdaily)** · [@divyansh30](https://daily.dev/divyansh30) · 1 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A discussion raises a common but hard-to-spot Kubernetes issue: HPA scaling out replicas while traffic remains pinned to a single hot pod due to persistent TCP, HTTP/2, or gRPC connections. The poster asks fellow DevOps engineers how they detect traffic skew and whether they solve it at the application or platform layer, linking to a write-up that reproduces the behavior on EKS and explores mitigation approaches. ## Content This is one of those Kubernetes problems that can be surprisingly difficult to spot. You see one pod running hot while several replicas are barely doing anything, so HPA adds more pods. But the traffic doesn't necessarily move. With persistent TCP connections, requests can stay pinned to the same backend pod. So you can end up paying for more pods and even more compute while the original hot pod is still handling most of the traffic. I'm curious how other DevOps engineers handle this: - Have you seen HPA scale out while traffic remained concentrated on one pod? - How do you identify traffic skew in production? - Have long-lived TCP, HTTP/2, or gRPC connections caused similar problems? - Do you solve this at the application or platform layer? I came across this write-up while looking into the problem. It reproduces the behavior on EKS and looks at different approaches to address it. [https://www.kubeblogs.com/kubernetes-traffic-skew-why-one-pod-gets-hot-while-others-sit-idle/](https://www.kubeblogs.com/kubernetes-traffic-skew-why-one-pod-gets-hot-while-others-sit-idle/) **Has anyone else run into a “hot pod” problem that turned out to be a traffic-distribution issue rather than a capacity problem?** #DevOps #Kubernetes #SRE #CloudInfrastructure #PlatformEngineering ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [HPA-managed workloads: Why the obvious waste stays](https://daily.dev/posts/hpa-managed-workloads-why-the-obvious-waste-stays-2n2zcoogi) · The New Stack · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Proactive Autoscaling for Edge Applications in Kubernetes](https://daily.dev/posts/proactive-autoscaling-for-edge-applications-in-kubernetes-us8x8yki9) · InfoQ · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#aws](https://daily.dev/tags/aws), [#kubernetes](https://daily.dev/tags/kubernetes), [#grpc](https://daily.dev/tags/grpc) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ever-had-hpa-scale-out-your-workload-while-one-pod-is-still-doing-most-of-the-work--hxxrxgpnl) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https://daily.dev/posts/ever-had-hpa-scale-out-your-workload-while-one-pod-is-still-doing-most-of-the-work--hxxrxgpnl","headline":"Ever Had HPA Scale Out Your Workload While One Pod Is Still Doing Most of the Work?","text":"A discussion raises a common but hard-to-spot Kubernetes issue: HPA scaling out replicas while traffic remains pinned to a single hot pod due to persistent TCP, HTTP/2, or gRPC connections. 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