The long desired feature to vertically resize Kubernetes pods (CPU and memory) in-place without restarting is landing soon. A common approach to "right-sizing" running pods is via Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) which observes usage via metrics API, recommends, and reactively applies recommended resources to the running pods.

An alternative approach is to resize pods based on deterministic events observed via eBPF. For example, we can capture events with eBPF to detect when a CPU-intensive process is going to be executed, and proactively resize the pod CPU accordingly.

In this session, Vinay will summarize the design of in-place resizing of K8s pods and Pablo will discuss the use case of remote development environments running inside pods. Such pods need minimal resources when a developer is writing code, but need significantly higher CPU & memory when the developer issues a “build” command or runs a battery of tests. We will show how eBPF can be leveraged to get ahead of the problem.