Excessive Scaling During Short-Term Traffic Spikes

Autoscaling triggered excessive scaling during short-term traffic spikes, leading to unnecessary resource usage.

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What Happened

Autoscaler responded too aggressively to short bursts of traffic, over-provisioning resources.

Diagnosis Steps

1Analyzed autoscaler logs and found it responded to brief traffic spikes with unnecessary scaling.
2Metrics confirmed that scaling decisions were based on short-lived traffic spikes.

Root Cause

Autoscaler was too sensitive to short-term traffic fluctuations.

Fix/Workaround

• Adjusted scaling policies to better handle short-term traffic spikes.
• Implemented rate-limiting for scaling events.

Lessons Learned

Autoscaling should account for long-term trends and ignore brief, short-lived spikes.

How to Avoid

1Use cooldown periods or smoothing algorithms to prevent scaling from reacting to short-lived fluctuations.
2Tune autoscaling policies based on long-term traffic patterns.