The correct answer is: Deployment with a HorizontalPodAutoscaler and PodAntiAffinity.

A Deployment with a HorizontalPodAutoscaler and PodAntiAffinity is appropriate because a Deployment manages stateless replicas and supports rolling updates while the HorizontalPodAutoscaler adjusts the number of pod replicas automatically based on CPU load. The PodAntiAffinity rules ensure that new pods are scheduled on different nodes when possible so no single node becomes overloaded and the service remains highly available.

In practice you declare resource requests on the containers so the HorizontalPodAutoscaler can use CPU metrics effectively and you apply either preferred or required PodAntiAffinity depending on how strictly you need pods separated across nodes.

StatefulSet with a HorizontalPodAutoscaler and Cluster Autoscaler is incorrect because a StatefulSet is intended for workloads that need stable network identities and persistent storage and it is not needed for a stateless service. The Cluster Autoscaler scales nodes rather than pods and does not by itself guarantee that pods will be dispersed across nodes.

Deployment with a HorizontalPodAutoscaler and NodeAffinity is incorrect because NodeAffinity is used to prefer or require nodes with certain labels and that can concentrate pods onto specific nodes. Node affinity does not ensure spreading across different nodes the way pod anti affinity does.

CronJob with a VerticalPodAutoscaler and NodeAffinity is incorrect because a CronJob runs scheduled batch jobs rather than a continuously running service. A VerticalPodAutoscaler adjusts container resource requests rather than scaling the number of replicas based on CPU load and it can conflict with horizontal scaling strategies.

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