How Zapier uses KEDA

Zapier relies heavily on RabbitMQ for message queuing in their backend workers, which run on Kubernetes. To manage varying task loads, they previously used CPU-based autoscaling with Horizontal Pod Autoscale (HPA), but encountered issues due to blocking I/O operations in Python. This led to a situation where idle workers could accumulate a growing backlog of messages, causing traffic jams and delays. Zapier sought a solution that would scale their workers based on both CPU usage and message queue length, but found Kubernetes' native HPA lacking this capability. They eventually turned to KEDA as a more suitable solution for dynamic scaling.