I have this same conversation about AWS autoscaling all too frequently. It is a cost control mechanism, not a physics cheat. if you suddenly throw a tidal wave

I have this same conversation about AWS autoscaling all too frequently. It is a cost control mechanism, not a physics cheat. if you suddenly throw a tidal wave of traffic at a server then that traffic is going to queue and/or drop until there are more servers. If you saturate the network before the CPU (which is easy to do with nginx) or your event loop is too slow to accept the connections so they are dropped without being processed (easy to do I nodejs) then you might not scale at all.