When you activate Headroom reduction on a workload, the following automatic steps ensure protection:
- Kompass prepares and then hibernates nodes. - When those nodes are ready, Kompass reduces the minimum replicas setting according to the selected optimization strategy. This process takes about an hour. 
 For auto-managed optimization, the minimum replicas setting is monitored (and adjusted if needed) throughout.
- Kompass listens to the unscheduled Pods pool. - When Kompass determines that there are unscheduled Pods in the pool, Kompass deploys pre-baked, hibernated nodes to respond to spikes. - At the same time, the autoscaler launches new nodes. 
- When the Kompass nodes are ready to host Pods, the unscheduled Pods are scheduled to the Kompass nodes. 
- 5 minutes after being reactivated, Kompass hibernated nodes are cordoned. 
- After the spike is over, Kompass nodes are gradually drained, until all Pods are hosted by autoscaler nodes. - To ensure smooth draining, the number of Pods may exceed the number that were running before the spike. 
- When Kompass nodes are empty (no more Pods being hosted), the nodes are terminated. 
The following diagram illustrates the process:

See also: