Signs it is time to revisit autoscaling

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. A few signals that autoscaling is due some attention.

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Scaling rules need testing under real load, not in theory
• Scaling up is easy, scaling down safely is the hard part

How to approach it

A slow dependency will not scale with you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What this looks like day to day

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

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