u/Ill_Car4570 — reddlx

Currently running HPA for scaling pods and Karpenter for nodes.

I’ve been wanting to get into vertical scaling as well (VPA or similar), but I keep seeing that it’s “not recommended” to run VPA together with HPA.

I understand they work differently and get in each other's way, but it seems weird that there's no way around that.

Is the issue specifically with the native VPA, or with vertical autoscaling in general?
Is it about conflicting signals (HPA scaling out while VPA scales up), or something more fundamental?

And more importantly, is this something that can be mitigated, or is it just a hard no?

Also curious about the operational side:

Are people actually running VPA in “auto” mode in production, or mostly using it for recommendations?
If you do want real vertical automation, is native VPA the way to go, or are people using other tools for this?

TIA for the replies.