Yup. Particularly because k8s scales based on whole system load, not single app load. It's harder to predict because it's better at optimizing resource utilization and ultimately lowering costs.
You can scale load on many things in more recent versions of K8s. for example, pubsub depth of un-acked messages, or custom metrics in prometheus format.
https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/tutorials/au...