<p>I was reviewing some of the HorizontalPodAutoscaler docs here: <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale-walkthrough/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale-walkthrough/</a> along with several other resources and I haven't been able to identify what pod status occurs during when HPA is actually scaling down. I'd imagine this goes from <code>running</code> to <code>terminated</code> but there's no mention of this in the docs.</p>

Wunderbread
<p>The HPA will change the Deployment's <code>replicas:</code> value, and which will change the <code>replicas:</code> value in the current ReplicaSet, which will cause one of the Pods to get deleted.  From the Pod's point of view this is the same as any other situation when a Pod gets deleted, including manual scale-in or updating the Deployment spec.</p>
<p>The &quot;status&quot; column in the <code>kubectl get pods</code> output should match the <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod-lifecycle/#pod-phase" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Pod phase</a>, except that <code>Terminating</code> and <code>Terminated</code> are special values.  If the Pod shuts down immediately I would expect it to jump from <code>Running</code> to <code>Terminated</code>, but it might wait in <code>Terminating</code> if it takes some time to do its cleanup after receiving the termination signal.</p>
