Personally, I prefer looking at something more like 95th percentile latency, versus average, which is what I think this article is showing. I suppose a histogram would give you the fullest picture, though.
> We measure latency for 10% of the requests, and plot each of these latencies individually on the graphs.
So for what it's worth these spikes may very well be single requests that are not relevant and are only triggered by the way the Kubernetes cluster was being manipulated for the test.
(disclaimer: one of the authors)