• How dramatic is the inbound traffic likely to be over
time for the application?
• What are the user requirements for the app that will
drive elasticity at the infrastructure level?
• What are the economics around building an autoscal-
ing platform behind the app?
• What changes need to be made to help the autoscal-
ing of the app be successful?
Once you get the answers to these questions, you can plot
your course. But you are not done. You cannot set it and for-
get it.
You have to constantly tune your autoscaling platform to
understand how your infrastructure is responding to the
application demands. That means the application team has
to have visibility into the user experience. If the user expe-
rience is slow, cumbersome in its latency and not able to get
the storage it needs in a timely fashion, the autoscaling
functions are not working well enough to give high marks in
a customer service application. In addition, the converse is
true: if the app does not scale down fast enough, you will
encounter significantly more costs. You will have all these
resources on that are not doing any work. There should be
a balance between knowing when to turn resources down
and when to turn them up.
Conclusion
To a certain extent, autoscaling could be considered table
stakes for using the cloud. If you have variable workloads,
you need to use the resources available to you to manage
them. Done right, autoscaling can help your business take
advantage of opportunities and operate in the most effi-
cient manner possible.
SPRING 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 51