What happens when a website goes viral: how a site keeps up with millions of visitors
Autoscaling: why adding servers by itself can still come too late
A website gets a big crowd in the morning and a small one at night. You pay for every server by the hour, even when it does nothing. Autoscaling adds and removes servers by itself. But a crowd can grow faster than autoscaling can follow.
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A few hundred players are left at night, and two servers would be plenty. But you cannot sit up all night switching servers off, then all morning switching them back on.
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The crowd comes and goes in waves: big at 9:00, small at night, bigger again whenever Rono posts. You want the number of servers to follow the waves on its own.
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