Managing Kubernetes clusters at scale is no easy task! When it comes to efficiently autoscaling nodes, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every application use case. The challenge lies in implementing centralized best practices, such as bin-packing and workload right-sizing while giving developers the flexibility to tailor the solution to their needs. This talk shares our platform team's journey from using a cluster autoscaler with static instance types to node scaling with dynamic instance sizes at scale. Along the way, we optimized costs and realized that reliability best practices, like Pod Disruption Budgets, Topology Spread Constraints, and resource rightsizing are more than just nice-to-have.

In the first part of the session the Kubernetes journey of Mercedes-Benz.io will be shared from it's first adoption with a single cluster in 2018 to the foundation of a platform for more than 50 product teams nowadays. The second half will give an overview on our aim for end-to-end responsibility of our developer teams providing a self-service first platform by leveraging tools like Crossplane, Kyverno and others.