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Is this a real thing or a urban legend? Does anyone have real examples?

• TheDong 8y ago
  Autoscaling groups on AWS are very real, very old, and very widely used. The Amazon Retail site scales its machines up and down. Netflix built a tool called "scryer" to guess when to spin up and down instances more accurately [0]. Jenkins has a series of plugins for provisioning workers on-demand, and multiple companies I've worked at have used that plugin (or a variant of it) to spin up CI workers when needed (during the work day usually) and shut them down when not needed. Clearly this is something that real companies do. If you wish to spend some time googling on how people use Autoscaling groups, you'll find many other examples. [0]: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/scryer-netflixs-predictive-auto-scaling-engine-a3f8fc922270 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/scryer-netflixs-predicti...
  • ju-st 8y ago
    But I suppose it's still not cheaper than just renting enough Hetzner servers for the peak?
    • scarface74 8y ago
      We have a peak where we use 16 instances for about two hours for the throughput we want and a trough where we only use one. The T2 instances are really cheap. This is a back end ETL message processing job. We also do an immutable deployment for our web stack - we spin up a completely new stack - VMs, autoscaling groups, load balancers, etc. test it, slowly move users over to it and then kill the old stack. That doesn’t even include all of the managed services we use and don’t have to worry about managing the underlying servers.