K8s HPA vs. VPA?

So if you are stateless you want HPA. Since it buys you scalability and HA at the same price.

If you are state-full you should prefer VPA.

If you are state-full and need HA you might want to combine both.

Another case for VPA is data processing, e.g. pandas, which might be easier to scale to bigger datasets without going into out of memory data frames.