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Vertical Pod Autoscaling

Standard Plan Feature

This feature is available in the Standard Plan and above. For more information, see our pricing plans or contact our sales team.

This guide walks through how to enable Provider Vertical Pod Autoscaling (VPA) for your Upbound Crossplane (UXP) Providers. Provider Autoscaling uses the Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler to ensure stable and efficient operation by dynamically sizing CPU and memory for provider pods running in a Kubernetes cluster.

Enable this feature if you observe provider pod resources (CPU and memory) hitting large performance spikes or maxing out.

Prerequisites​

Before you enable Provider Autoscaling, make sure you have:

  • A Kubernetes v1.28+ cluster running
  • A running UXP control plane
  • A valid Standard or Development license applied to your control plane

As part of the guide, we will also install the following prerequisites:

Install required dependencies​

If you don't have the Metrics Server or Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler, instal them:

Install metrics-server​

Add the Metrics Server Helm repository:

helm repo add metrics-server https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/metrics-server/
helm repo update

Install the Metrics server:

helm upgrade --install --set "args={--kubelet-insecure-tls}" metrics-server metrics-server/metrics-server --namespace kube-system --version 3.12.2

Install vertical pod autoscaler​

Follow the VPA installation instructions instructions before continuing.

Enable provider autoscaling​

Ensure you have the upbound-stable Helm repository configured:

helm repo add upbound-stable https://charts.upbound.io/stable
helm repo update

Enable the Provider Autoscaling feature flag in UXP:

helm upgrade --install crossplane --namespace crossplane-system --create-namespace upbound-stable/crossplane --devel --set "upbound.manager.args[0]=--enable-provider-vpa"

Configure provider with autoscaling​

Runtime configurations control how UXP deploys and operates Providers in your cluster. The two runtime types associated with Provider VPA are:

  • DeploymentRuntimeConfig: The standard Crossplane configuration that defines basic deployment settings for Providers
  • UpboundRuntimeConfig: A UXP-specific extension that provides capabilities like Provider VPA, extending beyond what the standard configuration offers

The DeploymentRuntimeConfig establishes the basic Provider deployment, while the UpboundRuntimeConfig adds UXP-specific features. A DeploymentRuntimeConfig can reference an UpboundRuntimeConfig by including the annotation pkg.upbound.io/runtime-config.

To configure a provider with autoscaling, create a DeploymentRuntimeConfig:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: upbound-provider-aws-ec2
spec:
  package: xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/provider-aws-ec2:v1.23.1
  runtimeConfigRef:
    apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1beta1
    kind: DeploymentRuntimeConfig
    name: config-aws

---

apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: DeploymentRuntimeConfig
metadata:
  name: config-aws
  annotations:
    pkg.upbound.io/runtime-config: config-aws
spec: {}
EOF

Create an UpboundRuntimeConfig with VPA settings:

The UpboundRuntimeConfig extends the upstream DeploymentRuntimeConfig with UXP-specific configuration options and defines the minimum and maximum system resource values.

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: pkg.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: UpboundRuntimeConfig
metadata:
  name: config-aws
spec:
  capabilities:
  - ProviderVPA
  verticalPodAutoscalerTemplate:
    spec:
      targetRef:
        kind: Deployment
        apiVersion: "apps/v1"
        name: provider
      resourcePolicy:
        containerPolicies:
          - containerName: '*'
            minAllowed:
              cpu: 500m
              memory: 100Mi
            maxAllowed:
              cpu: 2
              memory: 2000Mi
            controlledResources: ["cpu", "memory"]
EOF

To verify the VPA resource, use kubectl to check the vpa component.

kubectl get vpa -n crossplane-system

You should see MODE: Auto in the output:

NAME                                    MODE   CPU    MEM         PROVIDED   AGE
upbound-provider-aws-ec2-8cc80a57d291   Auto   500m   297164212   True       20m

Disable provider autoscaling​

If you need to disable Provider Autoscaling, remove the ProviderVPA capability from the UpboundRuntimeConfig:

kubectl patch upboundruntimeconfig config-aws --type=merge -p='{"spec":{"capabilities":[]}}'