---
title: "Spike protection with Fast scaling"
slug: "spike-protection-with-fast-scaling"
updated: 2026-07-16T10:43:57Z
published: 2026-07-16T10:55:53Z
canonical: "docs.zesty.co/spike-protection-with-fast-scaling"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.zesty.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Spike protection with Fast scaling

This section describes Zesty Spike protection.

Spike protection is provided by the Fast scaling solution.

Conventional K8s cluster management requires available capacity - scheduling unnecessary Pods on excess nodes - for unexpected spikes. This results in significant cost in idle resources, just in case.

Fast scaling harnesses HiberScale technology, eliminating the need for excess nodes or Pods in order to protect against unexpected spikes, while preserving your SLA.

HiberScale provisions and manages nodes that are prewarmed with downloaded Docker images and prestarted OS. HiberScale puts those nodes into AWS hibernation, ready to be resumed instantaneously.

In case of a spike, HiberScale can resume these nodes to full operational capacity significantly faster than native Kubernetes autoscalers. Scheduled Pods can serve requests within a matter of seconds, enabling applications to run 5 times sooner than standard.

For more information, see [HiberScale technology](/v1/docs/hiberscale-technology).

Very quick application boot time saves cost:

- During a spike, it reduces the need to launch more nodes as the current ones have more headroom.

Fast scaling relies on two agents installed on a cluster:

- The **Insights agent** This self-installed agent provides visibility into the workloads running in the cluster. It can take up to 2 days after installing the agent to deliver recommendations.
- The **Compute agent** This agent enables applying the solution to workloads. It can take up to 1 hour after installing the Compute agent before you can apply the solution. For maximum savings per cluster, the Compute agent installation is done together with Zesty Professional services.

For more information, see [Deploy Kubernetes resource optimization solutions](/v1/docs/deploy-kubernetes-resource-optimization-solutions).

A workload is protected after the following steps:

1. **You** apply Fast scaling to a workload from the user interface or using YAML.
2. **Zesty** prepares and hibernates nodes to protect the workload. This process completes within an hour of applying the solution.

### Spike protection supported environments

Spike protection supports these environments:

| Category | Supported |
| --- | --- |
| Environment | AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), v1.28 or later. From v1.33, in-place Pod vertical scaling is supported. |
| Resource provisioning | - Karpenter, v1.0 or later - Cluster Autoscaler, v1.0 or later |
| Cluster configuration | IAM role for Service Accounts (IRSA) |
| Autoscaling | HPA, KEDA |

Fast scaling cannot be applied to:

- workloads linked to node pools that have only GPU instances configured
- workloads linked to node pools that have a Bottlerocket image configured
- workloads where Pod rightsizing is applied