<p>Kubernetes 1.18 has a very nice ability to change auto-scaling going up through the behavior and scaleUp set. For 1.17, there's a way to control downscaling. Is there a parallel way to scale up faster? We are expecting very variable loads and our cluster isn't scaling up fast enough.</p>
<p>I am not sure what other info to include. I've been searching through the docs, but I cannot find anything that points me in the right direction.</p>

<p>Not really.</p>
<p>Assuming you are referring to HPAs, you can define a behavior <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/#default-behavior" rel="nofollow noreferrer">scaleUp Policy</a> only if you are using <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/#support-for-configurable-scaling-behavior" rel="nofollow noreferrer">K8s 1.18 or later (<em><code>v2beta2</code></em> HPA API)</a>. For example:</p>
<pre class="lang-yaml prettyprint-override"><code>behavior:
  scaleDown:
    stabilizationWindowSeconds: 300
    policies:
    - type: Percent
      value: 100
      periodSeconds: 15
  scaleUp: 👈
    stabilizationWindowSeconds: 0
    policies:
    - type: Percent
      value: 100
      periodSeconds: 15
    - type: Pods
      value: 4
      periodSeconds: 15
    selectPolicy: Max
</code></pre>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/LzoP9.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/LzoP9.png" alt="Autoscaling API" /></a></p>
<p>✌️</p>
