Autoscaling: the questions we get asked most

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. The questions about autoscaling that come up most often on our calls.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Do we need to care about this?

Scaling rules need testing under real load, not in theory. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How do we know it is working?

A slow dependency will not scale with you. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The short version

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Three things worth confirming about autoscaling before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Scaling rules need testing under real load, not in theory — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.