Situation
Had Already Set Up VPA On A GKE Workload (A ClickHouse Backend, After It OOM’d Twice) And Assumed — Wrongly — That Vertical Pod Autoscaler Was Something GKE Provided As A Managed Feature. Turns Out The “Enable” Button On GKE Is Just Google’s Wrapper Around The Same Open-Source kubernetes/autoscaler Project Anyone Can Install Anywhere. Wanted To Confirm That For Real, So I Put It On A 6-Node Homelab RKE2 Cluster With No Cloud Provider In Sight.
It Went In Clean. What Wasn’t Clean Was The First Recommendation It Handed Back For A Live Workload — Ten Times The Container’s Actual Memory Usage, Within Minutes Of Being Installed.