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Comment by davidjytang | Hacker News Reader

My experience with GCE's autoscaling has been that the up-scaling is much more aggressive than anticipated. I see with this predictive autoscaling, up-scaling would be even more aggressive.

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At least with AWS, auto scaling is biased towards aggressive scale-outs and conservative scale-ins, under the general principle that customers would prefer to err on the side of providing service and meeting their SLAs over conserving every last dollar of spend.

It makes sense that GCE would adopt the same attitude.

And the downscaling in my experience takes too long. Sometimes it feels it's done this way on purpose to rake in a few extra hours of compute pennies. It starts adding up... imagine if you have a million customers and you can suddenly charge them an extra few dollars per month.

I have an app that has been running on the old Python 2.7 App Engine platform for a few years. It gets very light traffic and usually costs $1 or $2 a month, mainly for datastore read ops.

Suddenly this month there was an additional $11.65 charge for "frontend instances". I've searched the dashboard, documentation, and my configuration files trying to figure out what this means. I still have no idea where it came from or how to stop it, short of turning off the app.

If you search for "frontend" on the App Engine Standard Pricing Page [1], it seems like your usage might be exceeding the free tier for frontend instances. Did the load on your app suddenly increase?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing

Yeah, that makes sense. A load increase that tripped the autoscaler to add a second instance that put me over free limits for the first time.

I think I figured out how to stop it from doing this: https://old.reddit.com/r/AppEngine/comments/od11sg

Thanks for the link.

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