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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

The "inelastic" might have been a shot at AWS. When pressed, the AWS people do use phrases like "pre-warming", "over provisioning" and "advance notice" around their ELB/ALB setup and ECS.

Google's cloud salespeople pitch that they don't require any of that.

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I think it depends on the nature of your spike.

AppEngine instances can typically start in 30 seconds or so. So if your spike is because your video went viral on facebook and lots of people are looking it it, that's fine.

If your spike is because you have 10 million clients with an app set to do an HTTP request at exactly 10:00:00pm, and they all arrive within a quarter second, thats a problem.

30 seconds is actually a gross overestimate for AE startup. Your description of our problem is very accurate, though. We still need to over-provision just before the spike, which we do with a cron that scales up to several hundred instances 5 minutes before 10pm and then back down to normal levels 5 minutes after. Autoscaling takes care of the rest.

It's funny they'd mention that, and then later in the same article say they had to use a Cron job to scale up their gcp solution for a daily spike.

Using a cron to scale an AE service to 500 instances 5 minutes before 10PM > bugging the infra team to bring up our 19th MySQL replica.

Curious if the need for pre-warming ELB/ALB still applies. Last time this came up, an AWS employee mentioned it is no longer necessary (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052079), but would be nice if this was documented.

I don't want to dox myself but about a year ago when my employer forgot to notify AWS about switching our production traffic (about 5K rps at that time) from one ELB to another we failed requests for several minutes before we decided to just switch back to the old ELB then ask them to do a prewarming before we switched again.

Possible. It is still in the documentation: https://aws.amazon.com/articles/1636185810492479#pre-warming

The "advance notice" and "over provision" advice is still being given for things that could scale up fairly large. (where fairly large isn't anything that exciting, really)

The poster was talking about ALBs. I'm not experienced enough with them to know whether the claim is true.

I do know on ELBs though, pre-warming is essential for high throughput.

It definitely still applies.

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