Spot Ocean does not provide its own Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) policy. Instead, HPA operates at the Kubernetes level, handling pod scaling. Ocean’s role is to manage and supply the compute capacity required for those pods to run.

Here is how the interaction works:

• HPA monitors workload demand and creates additional pod replicas as needed.

• Ocean dynamically provisions new nodes or scales down nodes to ensure the pods scheduled by Kubernetes have the resources they require.

Ocean complements Kubernetes autoscalers by focusing on infrastructure-level optimizations, while HPA addresses application-level scaling. Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) can also be used to adjust resource requests for individual pods, further improving efficiency.

For more information, refer to the resource: Cluster Autoscaler features and Ocean comparison.