<p>I am trying to set an horizontal pod autoscaling metrics on my GKE deployment based on absolute value but still didn't get the difference between the absolute value and the percentage :</p>
<p>let's say i'm requesting <strong>500mCPU</strong> per Pod for a starting number of 3 pods.</p>
<p>If i want to replace the autoscaling metrics of  <strong>&quot;50% of CPU Usage&quot;</strong> by an absolute value : will it be <strong>&quot;250 mCPU&quot;</strong> ?</p>
<p>is it based on an average user per pod or is it the total use for all the pods ?</p>
<p>thank you in advance</p>

mohamed wael thabet
<p>If you use <code>targetAverageValue</code> ( or even <code>targetAverageUtilization</code> ), the metric value used by the scaling algorithm is based on the average across all matching pods.</p>
<p>From the Horizontal Pod Autoscaling <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/#algorithm-details" rel="nofollow noreferrer">docs</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When a targetAverageValue or targetAverageUtilization is specified,
the currentMetricValue is computed by taking the average of the given
metric across all Pods in the HorizontalPodAutoscaler's scale target.</p>
</blockquote>
