Scaling

Overview

The Exoscale Platform provides two ways of scaling:

• Vertical
• Horizontal

Which way should be used also depends on your app’s architecture, and there is an impact on the operational procedures as well.

Vertical 🔗

• Can be done any time, while the instance is stopped
• Billing is always by the second

Horizontal 🔗

• Can be done any time, no instance stopping necessary
• Billing is always by the second

Instance Pools 🔗

Multiple compute instances with the same configuration in a group:

• Increase or decrease the amount of compute instances in an Instance Pool any time
• Increasing
  • will automatically boot up an instance with the same parameters again (template, cloud-init, …)
• Decreasing
  • will destroy the oldest VM in the Pool this way the whole pool can be cycled
• Often used together with cloud-init to provision the instances with an application.

Automation 🔗

• Can be scaled down and up by sending commands to the Exoscale API or CLI
• Easily and fully automatable out of the box using Kubernetes