Situation

Part 1 Ended With Two Unresolved Questions: A 250Mi Memory Target For A Dashboard Container Actually Using Only 24Mi, Sitting Suspiciously Close To The 256Mi Limit Already On The Deployment, With No Citable Reason Why. And A CPU Number That Had Never Once Caught My Attention, The One I’d Waved Through Without Checking. The Plan Was To Let It Accumulate History And Come Back To See Which Way The Memory Target Went. A Month Later It Went A Third Way I Hadn’t Considered, The Answer Had Nothing To Do With The Limit, And It Closed Both Questions At Once.

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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.

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