It always struck me as odd that one of the original defining features of AWS never had a web interface. Maybe they were making it API-only to protect people from shooting themselves in the foot with exorbitant bills. Regardless through I'm really glad to see this finally!
I think another part of it is that an API interface actually makes more sense. While the necessity for the non-technically inclined are pretty obvious, auto-scaling shouldn't usually be done reactively, and doing so is at the expense of optimal service delivery.
That said, I can imagine a good number of times it could come in handy, even for the techiest of us.
It might have simply not been the lowest hanging fruit, and the one thing I keep noticing that with AWS is that there are only two types of features they roll out -- new SKUs (e.g., something new that they can charge money for) and services that they should have written a long time ago, but probably didn't, because they were too busy launching new SKUs.
> auto-scaling shouldn't usually be done reactively, and doing so is at the expense of optimal service delivery.
You can react predictively (or predict reactively, whichever way you want to say it.)
Set up a cascade control system, training it as it runs on (process load x cost-of-scale.) It will begin to "see the signs" of load being about to occur, and adjust accordingly to reduce it. You know, just like any modern thermostat.
You can. I even qualified that in the next line. ;-)
Even easier, you could just say "Scale it up, we're demoing this to 3,000 users at PyCon", and do that proactively as well -- that said, it's likely done at the expense of efficiency or cost.
Yeah been wondering this myself. I think that's how Heroku really emerged in the scene, AWS gave you the ability to scale but didn't make it easy by any means (relative to 'heroku scale web n'). I doubt billing was the issue either considering tools for billing monitoring and email warnings have been in place for a while. My guess is that things that don't scale easily (db, workers, etc) which, are what most EC2 is used for, have to be scaled with an API and consequently that unprioritized webserver type autoscaling.
You can swap to local (ephemeral storage) at no charge. Or you can created a provisioned IOPS EBS volume and swap all you'd like. There's no separate I/O charge for these volumes.
