InferScale: Kubernetes-Native Predictive Autoscaling for SLO-Aware AI Inference

Overview & Synopsis

Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) is widely used for inference services, but reactive scaling is often too slow when pods take tens of seconds to become ready. The problem gets worse in shared clusters, where independent HPAs compete for the same resource budget and can hurt different tenants from run to run. We present InferScale, a Kubernetes-native autoscaler that combines inference-aware signals, short-horizon demand prediction, SLO-state control, fast-path spike handling, and tenant-priority headroom without replacing the default scheduler. We evaluate InferScale on Azure Kubernetes Service in two settings. On a real ResNet-50 ONNX workload with 21-second cold start, repeated ramp-burst runs improve SLO compliance from 47.8% +/- 1.5% under a stronger external-metric HPA to 65.3% +/- 9.0% under InferScale. In repeated controlled multi-tenant contention experiments, InferScale cuts Gold-tier SLO standard deviation from 16.1 to 1.2 percentage points and makes contention outcomes follow the priority policy more closely. Repeated single-service ablations show 6-8 percentage point degradation, with an exploratory priority ablation showing a 27-point drop under contention. The main takeaway is that, in startup-sensitive inference serving, the practical value of prediction lies less in precise forecasting than in moving the controller early enough to offset cold-start delay.