Chapter 8. Configuring Knative Serving autoscaling

You can specify the number of concurrent requests that should be handled by each instance of an application (revision container) by adding the target annotation or the containerConcurrency field in the revision template.

Here is an example of target being used in a revision template:

apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myapp
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        autoscaling.knative.dev/target: 50
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: myimage

Here is an example of containerConcurrency being used in a revision template:

apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myapp
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
    spec:
      containerConcurrency: 100
      containers:
      - image: myimage

Adding a value for both target and containerConcurrency will target the target number of concurrent requests, but impose a hard limit of the containerConcurrency number of requests.

For example, if the target value is 50 and the containerConcurrency value is 100, the targeted number of requests will be 50, but the hard limit will be 100.

If the containerConcurrency value is less than the target value, the target value will be tuned down, since there is no need to target more requests than the number that can actually be handled.

autoscaling.knative.dev/target: 50

containerConcurrency: 0 | 1 | 2-N

The minScale and maxScale annotations can be used to configure the minimum and maximum number of Pods that can serve applications. These annotations can be used to prevent cold starts or to help control computing costs.

minScale and maxScale can be configured as follows in the revision template:

spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      autoscaling.knative.dev/minScale: "2"
      autoscaling.knative.dev/maxScale: "10"

Using these annotations in the revision template will propagate this confguration to PodAutoscaler objects.