GCE Auto Scaling

GCP GCE Auto Scaling is a feature that allows you to automatically adjust the number of Compute Engine instances running in a managed instance group based on changes in traffic or other application-specific metrics. This helps you ensure that you have enough resources available to handle traffic spikes or increased demand for your application while minimizing costs during periods of low demand.

Auto Scaling can be configured to scale instances either vertically or horizontally. Vertical scaling involves adding more resources to an existing instance, such as increasing its CPU or RAM, while horizontal scaling involves adding or removing instances from a managed instance group.

There are several components to GCP GCE Auto Scaling:

1. Managed instance groups: A collection of homogeneous instances managed as a single entity and scaled up or down as needed.
2. Autoscaling policy: The rules and criteria used to determine when to add or remove instances from a managed instance group. This can be based on various metrics, such as CPU utilization, network traffic, or queue size.
3. Autoscaling cool-down period: The amount of time to wait before making additional scaling changes after an autoscaling event has occurred. This helps prevent unnecessary scaling actions and reduces costs.
4. Autoscaling thresholds: The minimum and maximum number of instances that can be in a managed instance group, as well as the target CPU utilization level.

By using GCP GCE Auto Scaling, you can improve your applications’ availability and reliability while optimizing your costs and reducing the need for manual intervention.

GCP GCE – Auto Scaling

Autoscaled managed instance groups are useful if you need many machines configured the same way and you want to add or remove instances based on need automatically.

• Automatically add or remove virtual machines from an instance group
• Allows graceful handling of increased traffic needs or can scale back to save costs
• Just need to define an auto-scaling policy to measure the load

Auto Scaling Policies

You can scale by:

• CPU utilization
• Based on LB service capacity – can be the utilization of LB or requests per second.
• Stackdriver Monitoring
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub queuing workload

Auto Scaling Specs

• Only works on managed instance groups
• Container Engine autoscaling is separate to compute Engineer autoscaling