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Why Auto-Scaling In the Cloud Is a Bad Idea
George Reese writes "It seems a lot of people are mistaking the very valuable benefit that cloud computing enables — dynamically scaling your infrastructure — with the potentially dangerous ability to scale your infrastructure automatically in real-time based on actual demand. An O'Reilly blog entry discusses why auto-scaling is not as cool a feature as you might think."
Without a hard-limit, some people run up big cell-phone bills. If you are forced to stop and plan and budget when you exceed resources, then you have better control over them. Cloud companies will likely not make metering very easy or cheap because they *want* you to get carried away.
Table-ized A.I.
THe author states that one reason he doesn't like autoscaling is because it can take a while to take effect. Thats bad technology, waiting for someone to come along and improve it.
He also says he doesnt like autoscaling even with limiters. Autoscaling with limiters makes sense to me, especially if the limits are things along the line of 'dont spend more than XXX over time Y'.
Finally, not using autoscaling because you might get DDoS'd is just stupid. You lose business/visitors. Thats worse than paying more to avoid being taken down, because your reputation gets hurt AS WELL AS losing you business.
Properly used, automation is a good thing. Blindly relying on it will get you burned, but to totally dismiss it out of hand is foolish.
First Rule of Automation: Automation applied to an efficient task increases it's efficiency; likewise, automation applied to an inefficient task will simply increase the problem until it's an all out clusterfuck.
Second Rule of Automation: Automation applied to an effective task will be effective; likewise, automation applied to an ineffective task will still be a pointless waste of time.
Or something like that. My eloquence appears to be -1 today.