You are performing a semi-annual capacity planning exercise for your flagship service. You expect a service user growth rate of 10% month-over-month over the next six months. Your service is fully containerized and runs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), using a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard regional cluster on three zones with cluster autoscaler enabled. You currently consume about 30% of your total deployed CPU capacity, and you require resilience against the failure of a zone. You want to ensure that your users experience minimal negative impact as a result of this growth or as a result of zone failure, while avoiding unnecessary costs. How should you prepare to handle the predicted growth?
A. Verify the maximum node pool size, enable a horizontal pod autoscaler, and then perform a load test to verify your expected resource needs.
B. Because you are deployed on GKE and are using a cluster autoscaler, your GKE cluster will scale automatically, regardless of growth rate.
C. Because you are at only 30% utilization, you have significant headroom and you won’t need to add any additional capacity for this rate of growth.
D. Proactively add 60% more node capacity to account for six months of 10% growth rate, and then perform a load test to make sure you have enough capacity.
Disclaimer
This is a practice question. There is no guarantee of coming this question in the certification exam.
Answer
A
Explanation
A. Verify the maximum node pool size, enable a horizontal pod autoscaler, and then perform a load test to verify your expected resource needs.
(The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler changes the shape of your Kubernetes workload by automatically increasing or decreasing the number of Pods in response to the workload’s CPU or memory consumption.)
B. Because you are deployed on GKE and are using a cluster autoscaler, your GKE cluster will scale automatically, regardless of growth rate.
(It is not based on the CPU; it’s based on the workload.)
C. Because you are at only 30% utilization, you have significant headroom and you won’t need to add any additional capacity for this rate of growth.
(Hope is not a strategy.)
D. Proactively add 60% more node capacity to account for six months of 10% growth rate, and then perform a load test to make sure you have enough capacity.
(No, have more resource than needed.)