Cutting Kubernetes Costs: Building a Smart Traffic-Aware Auto-Scaler for Idle Applications
How traffic awareness and application-level idle timers can help reclaim capacity without treating every workload as permanently active.
This is a concise portfolio reading guide to my published Medium article. For the complete original text, examples and diagrams, use the Medium link below.
Detecting inactivity
The proposed design observes ingress or Prometheus traffic signals and tracks idle periods for individual applications.
Scaling policy
After a configurable period of inactivity, a controller can scale eligible deployments to zero while excluding critical workloads.
Engineering constraints
Cold starts, false-positive inactivity, stateful services and Kubernetes RBAC require explicit safeguards.