Kubernetes' Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) tries to be helpful by tweaking CPU and memory requests on the fly. Problem is, it needs to bounce your pods to do it. And if you're also running Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) on the same metrics? Now they're fighting over control.

VPA sees a narrow slice of the world. No awareness of cluster topology. No big-picture view of workload patterns. It leans on short-term signals and brute-force restarts—not great if you're running critical, multi-region systems or trying to scale cleanly.