kubectl-vpa
Tool to manage VPAs (vertical-pod-autoscaler) resources in a kubernetes-cluster
- Create, Compare, Change UpdateMode and Suggest limits

Getting started
Prerequisites
Install the Vertical-Pod-Autoscaler from the official kubernetes/autoscaler-project
Recommended reading
Vertical Pod Autoscaling: The Definitive Guide by Povilas Versockas
Install & Run
To install:
go install github.com/ninlil/kubectl-vpa
To run:
kubectl-vpa ...
or using the kubectl-plugin-behavior
kubectl vpa ...
Quick-start
This will create a VPA-resource for all runnings pods that dont yet have one (with UpdateMode = Off)
kubectl-vpa compare -A -! -b | kubectl-vpa create -f - | kubectl apply -f -
Help and options
All command have their own help. Example:
kubectl-vpa compare -h
Create a VPA-resource
kubectl-vpa create foo/bar
This will find a Pod, Deployment, Daemonset, Statefulset or CronJob named 'bar' in the 'foo' namespace and output a document that is the VPA-resource of the found match.
Change 'mode' of a VPA
kubectl-vpa mode initial -n foo bar1 bar2 bar3 database/mysql
This will set the UpdateMode to 'Initial' on VPA bar1
, bar2
& bar3
in namespace foo
, and on mysql
in the database
namespace
Suggest limits (WIP)
kubectl-vpa suggest foo/bar
This will create snippets for us in a deployment (or other) resource describing requests if you do not want to use the 'recommender' module from the VPA
Compare VPA with current requests
This will match current running pods and their current requests with matching VPA and output differences.
Sorting, filtering and head/tail of output is also available.
Examples
Compare all VPA's in namespace foo
kubectl-vpa compare -n foo
List all pods (including those without a matching VPA), with a sum-line
kubectl-vpa compare -A -l -z
The output
The following columns are printed:
- Namespace
- Name (name of pod)
- Mode (the UpdateMode, used by the
recommender
)
- Container
- Req-CPU (the request-cpu of the container in the current instance, in milli-units)
- VPA-CPU (the 'Target'-value of the matching VPA)
- CPU diff% (difference between the previous 2 values)
- Req-RAM (the request-memory of the container in the current instance, in M-units)
- VPA-RAM (the 'Target'-value of the matching VPA)
- Mem. diff% (difference between the previous 2 values)
- sum(Δ) (the sum of the 2 diff%-values)
The 'diff%' values will be positive when a container is requesting more that it probably needs, meaning a negative value is when it should probably request more than it's currently doing.
The 'Mode' column will display '---' onlines that don't match a VPA.