The best option for automating scaling by only running enough Pods and nodes for the load is to configure the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and enable the cluster autoscaler. The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler is a feature that automatically adjusts the number of Pods in a deployment or replica set based on observed CPU utilization or custom metrics. The cluster autoscaler is a feature that automatically adjusts the size of a node pool based on the demand for node capacity. By using both features together, you can ensure that your application runs enough Pods to handle the load, and that your cluster runs enough nodes to host the Pods. This way, you can optimize your resource utilization and cost efficiency.

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/best-practices
. https://cloud.google.com/build/docs/speeding-up-builds#caching_directories_with_google_cloud_storage Caching directories with Google Cloud Storage To increase the speed of a build, reuse the results from a previous build. You can copy the results of a previous build to a Google Cloud Storage bucket, use the results for faster calculation, and then copy the new results back to the bucket. Use this method when your build takes a long time and produces a small number of files that does not take time to copy to and from Google Cloud Storage.
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Explanation
The best option for ensuring that the three environments are consistent and following Google-recommended practices is to use Cloud Build to render and deploy the network policies and the DaemonSet, and set up Config Sync to sync the configurations for the three environments. Cloud Build is a service that executes your builds on Google Cloud infrastructure. You can use Cloud Build to render and deploy your network policies and DaemonSet as code using tools like Kustomize, Helm, or kpt. Config Sync is a feature that enables you to manage the configurations of your GKE clusters from a single source of truth, such as a Git repository. You can use Config Sync to sync the configurations for your development, staging, and production environments and ensure that they are consistent.