Not for VMs but definitely for containers and functions (like AWS Lambda). You can configure them with soft and hard limits but also invocation counts and runti

Not for VMs but definitely for containers and functions (like AWS Lambda). You can configure them with soft and hard limits but also invocation counts and runtime. Doing the same in a VM might be possible (the technologies exist) but it's often the task or workload that needs to be modified to support it and when you are already doing that a step to containers, functions or horizontal scaling is just as easy (or hard). Horizontal scaling based on load is pretty common (classic ASGs but also overcapacity cost bidding based scaling).