What to ask your agency about autoscaling

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on autoscaling, these questions are worth asking early.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Scaling rules need testing under real load, not in theory. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

A slow dependency will not scale with you. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

How to tell if yours is fine

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 up is easy, scaling down safely is the hard part — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.