Beta Update: Time-based Auto-Scaling

2010/08/04

One of the really neat things about the elasticity of the cloud is the fact that you can spin up new instances at any time and shut them down at a later point in time. If you need additional power just for a specific time frame, say business hours, and you know upfront on what day of the week you need them, you can boot them up easily with Scalarium.

But wouldn't it be neat if your cloud management tool could do the job for you? Yeah, we think so too, it totally would.

Good news! We rolled out time-based auto-scaling recently. Now you can tell us when you need additional computing power, and how much you want, and we'll take care of it for you. The time frame is specified in full hours, so if you need an additional instance from just 8 to 9 in the morning, no problem. You can specify for any day of the week and for every instance seperately.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, let's look at how it's done. When adding a new instance to a role, you'll notice that we've split it up into three parts, and that there's a new tab called "Time based Instance".

For time-based auto-scaling we don't use your existing instances, we allow you define a separate stash of instances whose only purpose is to serve additional computing power, leaving your existing instances (which you control manually) untouched.

So if we go ahead and create a new time-based instance using the form hidden behind the new tab we can give it a spin. The new instance is put into a different group and sports a tiny icon to make it recognizable as an instance that's only active during specific hours on specific days.

When you created the new instance, we'll immediately take you to a new dialog, where you can specify the hours and days of the week the instance is supposed to run for every time-based instance in a specific role.

The list is sorted by availability zone, listing all the time-based instances in each zone. You can specify times for every day of the week, or only for specific days. Every box describes one hour in the day. If an instance has only a couple of days in the week configured, we make that visible by giving the box a lighter green on the "All" tab, as you can see on the last entry "mcfly".

And that's all there's to it. Neat! Now, if you specify an hour that falls into the current time of day (all times are UTC), the instance will be booted up automatically in the next couple of minutes. We don't just check every hour, we constantly check for updated auto-scaling settings. That's also true for disabling auto-scaling. So if you decide you no longer need to run a time-based instance, you can just unmark the corresponding hours, and we'll shut it down again within minutes.

Of course the above image showing the instance booting could be totally photoshopped, but you'll have to take my word for it, that it was just started up automatically. But hey, why not try it yourself?

So there, need processing power only during the day? Just tell us the time frame, and we'll take care of it for you. Time-based auto-scaling is just on of the features we've recently rolled out. Stay tuned!