<p>I have a kubernetes cluster for which a workload with Request : 1000m CPU and Limit 1200m CPU is deployed. Node template is 4-8096 and we never hit the RAM as workloads are more compute intensive.</p>

<p>My issue is as shown in the picture when the Auto-Scaler scaled the workload to 2 PODs, Kubernetes didn't scheduled the additional pod in the same node even though there is plenty of resources available. (2/3.92). Instead it had to schedule it on a new Node. This is a lot of waste and cost insensitive when we scale further up.</p>

<p>Is this normal behavior or what best practices can you recommend to achieve a better resource utilization?</p>

<p>Thanks.
Nowa.</p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/CcNXx.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/CcNXx.png" alt="Resource distribiution"></a></p>

<p><strong>UPDATE:</strong></p>

<p><strong>After applying the autoscaling-profile to optimize-utilization as suggested by the Erhard Czving's answer, the additional pod was scheduled onto the same node. So now as per total requests that's 3/3.92 ~ 76%.</strong> </p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/8FMTm.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/8FMTm.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>

Nowa Concordia
<p>Try the <a href="https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/cluster-autoscaler#autoscaling_profiles" rel="nofollow noreferrer">optimize-utilization</a> autoscaling profile.</p>

<p>It should keep the utilization much higher than the default profile, depending on the Kubernetes version used. Around 80% utilization is a good estimate.</p>

<p>Apply to a cluster with gcloud commands:</p>

<pre><code>gcloud beta container clusters update example-cluster --autoscaling-profile optimize-utilization
</code></pre>
