What Happens When 100,000 Users Show Up? Kubernetes Autoscaling Done RIGHT

Your app just hit #1 on Hacker News, or maybe your demo reel blew up on TikTok.

The traffic surge is real, and your app starts queueing, failing, and begging for more resources.

Most devs aren’t ready for the spike.

But what if you could scale to 10x traffic without burning cash on idle servers?

Here’s a practitioner’s guide to do Kubernetes autoscaling the right way!

(and please save this article, it might save you from a 3am wake-up call when your app goes viral!)

The Traffic Spike Problem We All Face

If you experience going from 50 users to 50,000 in an hour, your server won’t just crash; it will catch fire, roll down a hill, and explode.

The thing is, most of us either:

• Under-provision and watch our app crash when the world discovers it
• Over-provision and burn through our runway paying for idle servers

We’ve seen startups spending $3k/month on AWS for an app with 100 daily users “just in case it goes viral.”

That’s 36k/year of runway gone.