February 21, 2026
Spot instances are unused cloud capacity sold at a steep discount – typically 60-90% off on-demand pricing. The trade-off: the cloud provider can reclaim them with minimal notice. AWS gives a 2-minute warning, GCP gives 30 seconds, and Azure varies. Running Kubernetes workloads on spot instances is one of the most effective cost reduction strategies available, but it requires architecture that tolerates sudden node loss.
February 21, 2026
Horizontal scaling adds more pod replicas. Vertical scaling gives each pod more (or fewer) resources. VPA automates the vertical side by watching actual CPU and memory usage over time and adjusting resource requests to match reality. Without it, teams guess at resource requests during initial deployment and rarely revisit them, leading to either waste (over-provisioned) or instability (under-provisioned).
VPA monitors historical and current resource usage for pods in a target Deployment (or StatefulSet, DaemonSet, etc.) and produces recommendations for CPU and memory requests. Depending on the configured mode, it either reports these recommendations passively or actively applies them by evicting and recreating pods with updated requests.
A bare minikube cluster runs workloads but lacks the infrastructure that production clusters rely on – metrics collection, ingress routing, TLS, monitoring, and load balancer support. Minikube’s addon system bridges this gap with one-command installs of production components.
List everything minikube offers:
minikube addons listThis prints dozens of addons with their status. Most are disabled by default. The ones worth enabling depend on what you are testing, but a production-like setup typically needs five to seven of them.
Minikube gives you a real Kubernetes cluster wherever you need one – on a developer laptop, in a GitHub Actions runner, or in any CI environment that has Docker. The patterns differ between local development and CI, but the underlying approach is the same: stand up a cluster, deploy your workload and its dependencies, test against it, tear it down.