30 seconds is actually a gross overestimate for AE startup. Your description of our problem is very accurate, though. We still need to over-provision just befor

30 seconds is actually a gross overestimate for AE startup. Your description of our problem is very accurate, though. We still need to over-provision just before the spike, which we do with a cron that scales up to several hundred instances 5 minutes before 10pm and then back down to normal levels 5 minutes after. Autoscaling takes care of the rest.