etcd compaction strategy under heavy Kubernetes churn

Running a 12-node k8s cluster with aggressive HPA (scale 3→50 in <2min). etcd storage ballooned to 8GB before we tuned compaction intervals. Current setup: auto-compaction-retention=1h, defrag on a rolling schedule. What compaction strategy are teams using in production? Are you running defrag manually or automating it? We're seeing write latency spikes during defrag windows that overlap with deploy bursts. Jurisdiction: AGNOSTIC