<p>I set up my cluster and I want my deployments to scale up when the first pod uses 75% of one cpu (core). I did this with hpa and everything is working but I noticed that the hpa percentage is strange.</p>

<p>Based on what I know <code>1 cpu = 1000 milliunits</code> and what I see in <code>kubectl top pods</code> is pod-A using 9m but what I see in <code>kubectl get hpa</code> is <code>pod-A 9%/75%</code> which doesn't make sense, 9% of 1000 is 90 and not 9.
I want to know how hpa is calculating the percentage and how shall I configure it so when I reach 75% of one cpu it scales up?</p>

<p>To the horizontal pod autoscaler 100% of a metric (cpu or memory) is the amount set in resource requests. So if you pod requests 100m cpu, 9m is 9% and it would scale out on 75m.</p>

<p>Double check if you really have requested 1 (or 1000m) cpu by issuing <code>kubectl describe pod &lt;pod-name&gt;</code>.</p>
