Netflix scales on short intervals for reliability. Scale up quickly to handle a spike in traffic, scale down slowly to save money. They also do proactive scal

Netflix scales on short intervals for reliability. Scale up quickly to handle a spike in traffic, scale down slowly to save money. They also do proactive scaling to address the issues you brought up, since they can predict with fairly high accuracy the normal viewing patterns. For example scaling up on Saturday morning ahead of all the kids waking up.