The biggest challenges I’ve had with auto scaling have been slow scaling time and default metrics not being a good proxy for scaling needs. One thing I was mildly curious about: if you’re going to build your own metrics and scaler, what would be some of the downsides of having it scale down by just putting instances in the Stopped state, then scale up by starting them? In my experience starting takes seconds while launching new instances takes minutes.
Having to deploy updates to stopped instances would be complicated and you’d have to pay EBS costs for stopped instances, but I’m curious if there are other issues. Launching an instance from an AMI, even after the instance comes up the disk tends to be very slow for some time as if it’s lazily loading the filesystem over the network.
Having to deploy updates to stopped instances would be complicated and you’d have to pay EBS costs for stopped instances, but I’m curious if there are other issues. Launching an instance from an AMI, even after the instance comes up the disk tends to be very slow for some time as if it’s lazily loading the filesystem over the network.