Vertical Pod Autoscaler does not respect safe-to-evict: False annotations

[jan-kantert]

Which component are you using?:

/area vertical-pod-autoscaler

What version of the component are you using?:

Component version: v1.4.1 (and most previous versions)

What k8s version are you using (kubectl version)?:

1.30

What environment is this in?:

KOPS on AWS

What did you expect to happen?:

When a pod is annotated with cluster-autoscaler.kubernetes.io/safe-to-evict: False we expect that that the VPA updater does not evict the pod. We temporarily add those annotations to minimize restarts during certain periods.

What happened instead?:

The VPA updater will evict pods with cluster-autoscaler.kubernetes.io/safe-to-evict: False.

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible):

1. Configure a VPA for your pod
2. Annotate your pod with cluster-autoscaler.kubernetes.io/safe-to-evict: False
3. Make sure resource usage changes.
4. VPA updater will evict the pod

[adrianmoisey]

Can you give us a little more details here? VPA does watch PDB policies to ensure that it doesn't disrupt workloads.
What use case do you have that requires it look at cluster-autoscaler.kubernetes.io/safe-to-evict: False too?

I'm also not sure this is a bug report, as the annotation is called "cluster-autoscaler", and not "vertical-pod-autoscaler", this feels like a feature request.