Scheduling, Resource Guardrails, and Autoscaling in Kubernetes: HPA, VPA, and Karpenter

<p>Take Kubernetes scheduling and capacity management from theory to production reality: node and pod affinity/anti-affinity, taints and tolerations, and topology spread constraints to control where Pods land; requests, limits, QoS classes, LimitRanges, ResourceQuotas, and PodDisruptionBudgets to keep a shared cluster stable under load; a CPU-based HorizontalPodAutoscaler and a recommendation-only VerticalPodAutoscaler to right-size Pods; and Cluster Autoscaler, Karpenter, and EKS Auto Mode to add nodes when Pods can't fit. Follows Cinder Peak Outdoors' TrailDesk booking platform through a single running scenario, from a shaky peak-season deployment to a cluster that scales itself sanely.</p>

Tools: kubernetes, scheduling, hpa, vpa, karpenter, cluster autoscaler