Autoscaling has been the most frequently requested feature since the early days of Cloud 66. While we tried, we never delivered it to our customers for an array of reasons:
- Autoscaling requirements vary a lot: some customers want to scale up on VM load, some on queue backlog, some based on a daily schedule, and some on a calendar event like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
- Autoscaling down usually needs a lot of work to get right. If you don't get the logic right, you might end up losing customers, deleting important data or overloading your servers.
Not only are the requirements for autoscaling wide and varied, but any serious autoscaling algorithm needs high quality metrics from your servers in order to function properly. We are not a metrics company. Many of our customers already use monitoring services like NewRelic, Datadog, or Scout and we wanted them to be able to use what they already have instead of yet another solution.
Today I am excited to announce the release of the Cloud 66 Zapier integration! Using our Zapier app, you can define your own workflows to scale your servers up or down for your Rails and Node applications. These workflows can be driven by other Zaps from your existing monitoring tools, a Slack message, a basic schedule, or a simple webhook that you can integrate into the rest of your tooling.
We are also working on a lot of improvements on our products to speed up scaling actions, from the ability to bring your own cloud images to pre-compiling many of the components needed for a VM setup.
Check out the documentation on our Zapier app and let us know how we can make it even better!