Having used AWS in production for about 2 years, I can say that scaling in the cloud is hard to get right. Spikes of traffic and load are hard to scale with, es

Having used AWS in production for about 2 years, I can say that scaling in the cloud is hard to get right. Spikes of traffic and load are hard to scale with, especially if you're scaling down to just the right amount of instances to manage the current load. We try to keep 50% capacity free for such spikes. Speaking with AWS support, we can fix issues with limits and scaling elbs, in hours not weeks, so I haven't had the same experience as you in that respect. One thing I would suggest, is that you have 2 AWS accounts. One for dev and one for prod. This way you should be able to see the limits that you're hitting before you get to production, and can raise tickets to get them ammended.