Chainguard Container for vertical-pod-autoscaler

Image to automatically adjust the amount of CPU and memory requested by pods running in the Kubernetes Cluster

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/vertical-pod-autoscaler:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) is a Kubernetes component that automatically adjusts the CPU and memory resource requests for pods based on their historical usage patterns. VPA helps optimize resource utilization and ensures applications have adequate resources without over-provisioning.

Chainguard's VPA images are designed to be drop-in replacements for the upstream VPA images. Some key differences from upstream images include:

• Minimal base: Built on Wolfi Linux undistro for reduced attack surface
• No shell or package manager: The default images contain only the VPA binaries and required runtime dependencies
• Dev variants available: For debugging or custom builds, -dev variants include shell and package manager

As of this writing, the image definition produces three separate container images for the VPA components:

Admission Controller (vertical-pod-autoscaler-admission-controller)

The admission controller is a webhook that intercepts pod creation and update requests. It applies the resource recommendations by modifying the pod's resource requests according to the VPA policies before the pod is created or updated in the cluster.

Recommender (vertical-pod-autoscaler-recommender)

The recommender component analyzes the historical resource usage of pods and generates resource recommendations. It monitors metrics from the Kubernetes metrics server and calculates optimal CPU and memory requests based on observed usage patterns.

Updater (vertical-pod-autoscaler-updater)

The updater component is responsible for evicting pods when VPA determines they need to be restarted with new resource requests. Since Kubernetes cannot change resource requests on running pods, the updater evicts pods so they can be recreated with updated resource allocations by the admission controller.

Getting Started

All three components work together to provide complete vertical autoscaling functionality. Deploy them using the official VPA Helm charts or Kubernetes manifests, replacing the upstream images with these Chainguard variants for enhanced security.

Documentation and Resources

• Official Kubernetes VPA Documentation
• VPA Design Proposals
• VPA Installation Guide
• VPA API Reference
• Best Practices for VPA

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard Containers are minimal container images that are secure by default.

In many cases, the Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Containers are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a -dev variant.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to leverage the -dev variants, copying application artifacts into a final minimal container that offers a reduced attack surface that won’t allow package installations or logins.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Containers, please visit Chainguard Academy and Chainguard Courses.

In addition to Containers, Chainguard offers VMs and Libraries. Contact Chainguard to access additional products.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.