<p>I tried to find a clear answer to this, and I'm sure it's in the kubernetes documentation somewhere but I couldn't find it.</p>
<p>If I have 4 nodes in my cluster, and am running a compute intensive pod which presumably uses up all/most of the resources on a single node, and I scale that pod to 4 replicas- will Kubernetes put those new pods on the unused nodes automatically?</p>
<p>Or, in the case where that compute intensive pod is not actually crunching numbers at the time but I scale the pod to 4 replicas (ie: node running the original pod has plenty of 'available' resources) will kubernetes still see that there are 3 other totally free nodes and start the pods on them?</p>

RonManning
<p>As far as I remember, it depends on the scheduler configuration.
If you are running your on-premise kubernetes cluster and you have access to the scheduler process, you can tune the policy as you prefer (see <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/scheduling-eviction/kube-scheduler/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">documentation</a>).</p>
<p>Otherwise, you can only play with the pod resource requests/limits and anti-affinity (see <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/scheduling-eviction/assign-pod-node/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>).</p>
