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But you have to buy those servers, set them up, use them for that week, and then they're left idle for the whole of the year.

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You don’t need to buy them, you can get them from AWS for that period only. Doesn’t mean your whole stack needs to be on AWS.

Doesn't mean, it significantly complicates state. Because the place that stores it (say, your bare metal machine with your database) is now the bottleneck.

None of the autoscaling solutions presented in the post address the database issue either.

I agree that in general the database is always going to be your bottleneck and autoscaling appservers is generally bullshit.

But let’s assume your DB is fine and you do actually need to scale appservers beyond what your provisioned capacity can allow, you can trivially spin up VMs at AWS or your provider of choice, Wireguard to your “VPC” at your bare-metal provider (or just SSH tunnel the ports) and run your appserver binary/container/etc on it.

Hell in a pinch you can do the above with your dev laptop and serve traffic from it. It will work and your customers won’t even be able to tell.

> But you have to buy those servers, set them up, use them for that week, and then they're left idle for the whole of the year.

I didn't say you have to buy them. I said you can spin up extra capacity.

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