Blog
Product
4
minutes

Scale What Matters, Not Just CPU - Welcome Keda autoscaling

Not every workload should scale on CPU. Qovery brings event-driven autoscaling into the application lifecycle, letting applications scale on real signals like queue depth or request latency.
January 27, 2026
Alessandro Carrano
Head of Product
Summary
Twitter icon
linkedin icon

When CPU-Based Autoscaling Falls Short

Many production workloads cannot scale safely using CPU or memory. Take a billing system that processes batch requests via asynchronous jobs: you actually want each worker to run hot at 100% CPU, while scaling should follow the backlog in the queue. With CPU-based autoscaling, scaling often reacts too late, queues grow, and teams end up manually tweaking autoscaling settings during spikes to protect customer SLAs.

Autoscaling as a First-Class Platform Capability

Qovery reduces the operational effort required to run production workloads that need advanced Kubernetes primitives.

With KEDA integrated directly into application autoscaling, Qovery installs and manages KEDA for you and exposes it where you already configure scaling. You can choose standard HPA (CPU/memory) or switch to custom metrics without turning autoscaling into a separate infrastructure project.

What Changes for DevOps Teams

  • Reduced risk of incidents on spikes or traffic change
  • Fewer scripts or custom autoscalers to maintain
  • Less waiting on DevOps to adjust manually the autoscaling

A Real-World Scenario

A customer running a billing system processes invoices through daily asynchronous jobs where latency directly impacts customer SLAs. With CPU-based autoscaling, scaling did not react fast enough to request spikes, forcing the team to manually adjust configurations to avoid delays. By enabling custom autoscaling on their SQS queue, they now scale jobs based on pending requests and consistently meet their SLOs.

How It Works in Qovery

  1. Open the service settings.
  2. Update autoscaling to use custom metrics with KEDA.
  3. Configure the metric source and the scaling rule to follow.

Try It on Your Workloads

Enable this on staging today and validate with a queue-driven workload. Read the docs here

Not yet a customer? Test our platform here!

Share on :
Twitter icon
linkedin icon
Tired of fighting your Kubernetes platform?
Qovery provides a unified Kubernetes control plane for cluster provisioning, security, and deployments - giving you an enterprise-grade platform without the DIY overhead.
See it in action

Suggested articles

Kubernetes
8
 minutes
Kubernetes management in 2026: mastering Day-2 ops with agentic control

The cluster coming up is the easy part. What catches teams off guard is what happens six months later: certificates expire without a single alert, node pools run at 40% over-provisioned because nobody revisited the initial resource requests, and a manual kubectl patch applied during a 2am incident is now permanent state. Agentic control planes enforce declared state continuously. Monitoring tools just report the problem.

Mélanie Dallé
Senior Marketing Manager
Kubernetes
6
 minutes
Kubernetes observability at scale: how to cut APM costs without losing visibility

The instinct when setting up Kubernetes observability is to instrument everything and send it all to your APM vendor. That works fine at ten nodes. At a hundred, the bill becomes a board-level conversation. The less obvious problem is the fix most teams reach for: aggressive sampling. That is how intermittent failures affecting 1% of requests disappear from your monitoring entirely.

Mélanie Dallé
Senior Marketing Manager
Kubernetes
 minutes
How to automate environment sleeping and stop paying for idle Kubernetes resources

Scaling your deployments to zero is only half the battle. If your cluster autoscaler does not aggressively bin-pack and terminate the underlying worker nodes, you are still paying for idle metal. True environment sleeping requires tight integration between your ingress layer and your node provisioner to actually realize FinOps savings.

Mélanie Dallé
Senior Marketing Manager
Kubernetes
DevOps
6
 minutes
10 best Kubernetes management tools for enterprise fleets in 2026

The structure, table, tool list, and code blocks are all worth keeping. The main work is fixing AI-isms in the prose, updating the case study to real metrics, correcting the FAQ format, and replacing the CTAs with the proper HTML blocks. The tool descriptions need the "Core strengths / Potential weaknesses" headers made less template-y, and the intro needs a sharper human voice.

Mélanie Dallé
Senior Marketing Manager
DevOps
Kubernetes
Platform Engineering
6
 minutes
10 best Red Hat OpenShift alternatives to reduce licensing costs

For years, Red Hat OpenShift has been the safe choice for heavily regulated, on-premise environments. It operates as a secure fortress. But in the public cloud, that fortress acts as an expensive prison. Paying proprietary per-core licensing fees on top of your standard AWS or GCP compute bill is a redundant "middleware tax." Escaping OpenShift requires decoupling your infrastructure from your developer experience by running standard, vanilla Kubernetes paired with an agentic control plane.

Morgan Perry
Co-founder
AI
Product
3
 minutes
Qovery Skill for AI Agents: Deploy Apps in One Prompt

Use Qovery from Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex, and 20+ AI Coding agents

Romaric Philogène
CEO & Co-founder
Kubernetes
 minutes
Stopping Kubernetes cloud waste: agentic automation for enterprise fleets

Agentic Kubernetes resource reclamation is the practice of using an autonomous control plane to continuously identify, suspend, and delete idle infrastructure across a multi-cloud Kubernetes fleet. It replaces manual cleanup and reactive autoscaling with intent-based policies that act on business state, eliminating the configuration drift and cloud waste typical of unmanaged fleets.

Mélanie Dallé
Senior Marketing Manager
Platform Engineering
Kubernetes
DevOps
10
 minutes
What is Kubernetes? The reality of Day-2 enterprise fleet orchestration

Kubernetes focuses on container orchestration, but the reality on the ground is far less forgiving. Provisioning a single cluster is a trivial Day-1 exercise. The true operational nightmare begins on Day 2. Teams that treat multi-cloud fleets like isolated pets inevitably face crushing YAML configuration drift, runaway AWS bills, and severe scaling bottlenecks.

Morgan Perry
Co-founder

It’s time to change
the way you manage K8s

Turn Kubernetes into your strategic advantage with Qovery, automating the heavy lifting while you stay in control.