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>- Use Terraform to provision VMs, networking resources and storage from DigitalOcean. Basically, write the scripts that make your whole infrastructure available with a single command.

How does autoscaling work if terraform/ansible are involved before kubernetes can take over?

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IMO it's better for autoscaling to bake VM images and use cloud-init or similar to add per-instance config tweaks if necessary. Using Ansible to do runtime configuration is slow and doesn't play well with autoscaling. I do like Ansible, however, and use it for building EC2 AMIs. I even wrote a tool for this purpose at https://github.com/cloudboss/bossimage.

There are generally two levels of autoscaling involved with kubernetes.

Firstly, kubernetes is able to create multiple instances of your app as load increases and scale them out over all the nodes.

Secondly, the nodes your kubernetes cluster is running on can also autoscale. With terraform you can set up an AWS autoscaling group for example to automatically increase the size of your cluster as load increases.

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