Platform & DevOps·Placement, resources and the pod lifecycle
a workload could not be placed, so a new machine was bought, booted and joined the cluster — three minutes after you needed it.
Cluster autoscaling
Also callednode autoscaler, cluster autoscaler, node provisioning
Adding and removing nodes in response to unschedulable workloads and to nodes that could be emptied. It is the layer that turns pod autoscaling into an actual change in what you are paying, and it operates on a much slower clock because it involves provisioning machines. Scale-down is the harder half: one workload with no other home, or a restrictive disruption budget, will keep an almost-empty expensive node alive indefinitely.