Autoscaler removal spiral during ramp
A morning traffic ramp at 09:00 triggers a cascading collapse instead of a smooth scale-up. Dashboards: as load rose, autoscaler added pods; new pods take ~90s to warm caches/JIT before serving fast; during warm-up they're slow, so the LB's per-pod success rate drops, the LB marks them unhealthy and removes them, which dumps their share of load back onto the already-hot old pods, which then also start failing health checks — a removal spiral. Effective capacity is DROPPING as you add pods. No deploy. How do you triage and mitigate?
What a strong answer looks like
Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.
0:00 of about 40 min
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.