Scaling Down for Holidays

Another common use case for the Kubedownscaler is using it to scale down the cluster over Holidays.

Depending on your use case you can apply this cluster-wide or on either namespace or workload level.

For this we will use the force downtime value since it doesn't interfere with the usual downtime configuration and can still be overridden to be able to stop some workloads or entire namespaces from being downscaled by this configuration.

The Timespan(s) for this sort of configuration would likely be manually configured absolute timespans, commonly between 12 AM the day the holiday starts and 12 AM the day after the holiday ends. This way, the other configuration (like night time scaling) can handle the cluster until and after the Holiday begins.

note

If any error occurs during scanning the workload its state will not be changed.

Cluster-Wide

In order to apply the wanted downtime cluster-wide the GoKubeDownscaler has to know what downtime to use. This can be done by using a cli argument for the GoKubeDownscaler.

You can add cli arguments inside the values.yaml file.

There you have to add it to the arguments field:

values.yaml

# ...

arguments:
  - --force-downtime="2025-12-22T00:00:00+01:00 - 2026-1-7T00:00:00+01:00"
# ...

After setting the value all workloads in your cluster will be scaled down from the 22nd of December 2025 to the end of 6th of January 2026.

Namespace Level

To set this up for all workloads in a namespace you have to annotate the namespace with the wanted time span.

This can be done using a kubectl command or by editing the namespace's yaml manifest.

kubectl

Adding the downtime with kubectl is a single command:

kubectl annotate ns my-namespace downscaler/force-downtime="2025-12-22T00:00:00+01:00 - 2026-1-7T00:00:00+01:00"

Edit manifest

If you want to edit the annotations manually with a yaml manifest file or by running kubectl edit ns my-namespace you have to add the following:

my-namespace.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: my-namespace
  annotations:
    downscaler/force-downtime: "2025-12-22T00:00:00+01:00 - 2026-1-7T00:00:00+01:00"

Now all workloads in my-namespace will be scaled down from the 22nd of December 2025 to the end of 6th of January 2026.

Workload Level

To set this up for individual workloads you have to set an annotation on each workload you want to scale down.

This can also be done by either using a kubectl command or by editing the workload's yaml manifest.

For demo purposes we will showcase this with a deployment.

kubectl

Adding the downtime with kubectl is a single command:

kubectl annotate deployment my-deployment downscaler/force-downtime="2025-12-22T00:00:00+01:00 - 2026-1-7T00:00:00+01:00"

Edit manifest

If you want to edit the annotations manually with a yaml manifest file or by running kubectl edit deployment my-deployment you have to add the following:

my-deployment.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-deployment
  annotations:
    downscaler/force-downtime: "2025-12-22T00:00:00+01:00 - 2026-1-7T00:00:00+01:00"
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:1.14.2
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

Now your deployment my-deployment will be scaled down from the 22nd of December 2025 to the end of 6th of January 2026.

Excluding Workloads From This Configuration

For excluding a workload specifically from this kind of configuration we can simply reuse the force downtime value by setting it to false on the workload or the namespace

note

You could also just as well use the exclude value to stop workloads from being influenced by this configuration. The only difference is that this will not allow you to use any of the downscalers functionality on this workload.

Excluding a Namespace

kubectl

Adding the downtime with kubectl is a single command:

kubectl annotate ns my-namespace downscaler/force-downtime="false"

Edit manifest

If you want to edit the annotations manually with a yaml manifest file or by running kubectl edit ns my-namespace you have to add the following:

my-namespace.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: my-namespace
  annotations:
    downscaler/force-downtime: "false"

This way every workload within this namespace doesn't get affected by the cluster-wide holiday downtime.

Excluding a Workload

kubectl

Adding the downtime with kubectl is a single command:

kubectl annotate deployment my-deployment downscaler/force-downtime="false"

Edit manifest

If you want to edit the annotations manually with a yaml manifest file or by running kubectl edit deployment my-deployment you have to add the following:

my-deployment.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-deployment
  annotations:
    downscaler/force-downtime: "false"
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:1.14.2
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80