Each component of Istio has the autoscaling value set to false for the demo profile (using install/kubernetes/istio-demo.yaml). You can set autoscaleEnabled to true for different components in install/kubernetes/helm/istio/values-istio-demo.yaml to enable autoscaling. This configuration may work nicely in production environments based on deployed applications where the autoscaling of pods may help to handle increased workloads.
To get the benefits of autoscaling, we should be careful in selecting the applications since autoscaling applications in high-latency environments can make the situation go from bad to worse in handling the increased workload.
Pod scaling can be enabled at the time of the Helm installation if the following parameters are passed to the helm install command using the --set argument:
mixer.policy.autoscaleEnabled=true
mixer...
