Google Adds Autoscaling to Compute Engine
Autoscaling features were rumored to be on their way to Google Compute Engine several months back, and now Google has announced a preview of such features.
Google software engineer Filip Balejko noted in a blog post that intelligent horizontal autoscaling features have already been available for Google Search and Gmail. The same team that built those autoscaling features are responsible for the development of similar features for Compute Engine.
“Autoscaling allows customers to build more cost effective and resilient applications. Using Compute Engine autoscaling, you can ensure that exactly the right number of Compute Engine instances are available at any given time to handle your application’s workload,” Balejko wrote. “This saves you money when your application’s usage is low, and ensures your application is responsive when utilization is high.”
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The autoscaling feature was designed to intelligently and dynamically scale the number of instances in response to different load conditions by defining the ideal utilization level of a group of instances, Balejko noted. The gist of the feature is that when utilization increases or decreases, the autoscaling feature will automatically detect the change and adjust the number of running instances to match.
The Google Compute Engine autoscaler can respond to various metrics, including CPU load, QPS on a HTTP load balancer and tailored metrics defined using the cloud monitoring service.
According to Google, it not only chooses the correct number of instances, but it also adapts automatically based on how far the current state is from the desired target. Basically, that means the autoscaler was designed to perform well even in unexpected scenarios, including sudden traffic spikes.
The target general availability date has not yet been set.
