---
name: containers-ts-ca-unbalanced
title: Why are my autoscaled worker pools unbalanced?
description: During a scale-up, the cluster autoscaler balances nodes across zones, with a permitted difference of plus or minus one worker node.
last-updated: 2026-07-30
---

> ## Documentation Index
> The table of contents for this documentation set is at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/containers?format=markdown
> The index for all IBM Cloud docs is at: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use these files to discover more information as needed.

# Why are my autoscaled worker pools unbalanced?
{: #ts-ca-unbalanced}

During a scale-up, the cluster autoscaler balances nodes across zones, with a permitted difference of plus or minus one worker node.
{: tsSymptoms}

Your pending workloads might not request enough capacity to make each zone balanced.
{: tsCauses}

To balance the worker pools manually, [update your cluster autoscaler ConfigMap](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/containers?topic=containers-cluster-scaling-install-addon-enable&format=markdown) to remove the unbalanced worker pool. Then, run the `ibmcloud ks worker-pool rebalance` [command](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/containers?topic=containers-kubernetes-service-cli&format=markdown#worker-pool-rebalance-cli), and add the worker pool back to the cluster autoscaler ConfigMap.
{: tsResolve}