title: Kubernetes: how to add flags for kube-controller-manager in Google Kubernetes Engine (gke)
body: <p>I have a deploy in gke associated with an horizontal pod autoscaler, based on an external metric (pubsub subscription).</p>
  
  <p>For some reason, the autoscaler is creating a ripple (or thrashing) effect on my pods, making them keep being scaled up and down to the same values each minute (as seem on the graph below).</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/eJxEt.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/eJxEt.png" alt="Graph of pods and nodes going up and down every 1 minute"></a></p>
  
  <p><a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/#support-for-cooldown-delay" rel="nofollow noreferrer">I found out</a> that there is a flag for the <em>kube-controller-manager</em> component that introduces a cooldown time between downscale events (<code>--horizontal-pod-autoscaler-downscale-stabilization</code>).</p>
  
  <p>However, I can't access the configurations for the <em>kube-controller-manager</em> in GKE. Is there any workaround for it? And if it's impossible to configure it in GKE, is there another way to mitigate this effect?</p>