Event-Based Autoscaling: Ensuring Smooth Operations on Your Peak Days

In today’s world, companies often find themselves grappling with unpredictable surges in workloads, especially during pivotal events. Think about retailers gearing up for Black Friday, sports betting companies preparing for specific games, or marketing teams orchestrating major campaigns. These organizations face a common challenge – how much infrastructure do they need to ensure optimal performance without overprovisioning – which can become very costly, very quickly. This poses a significant challenge for businesses since miscalculations can lead to latency, lost customers, and significant financial losses, even as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute.

Remember when the Game of Thrones spinoff had technical difficulties during its premiere? Millions of viewers were left disappointed, and HBO's reputation took a hit. This incident serves as a stark illustration of insufficient infrastructure planning during a critical event. Similarly, numerous instances of customer backlash during major shopping events have highlighted the urgency for effective solutions in managing fluctuating workloads. Even retail giants like Amazon have faced customer dissatisfaction during events like Prime Day when the website couldn't handle the traffic.

The Problem

When an organization prepares for a major event when traffic will skyrocket, they typically have to make an educated guess about how much additional infrastructure they need. However, this inherent guesswork can lead to costly misjudgments. Even the slightest error can lead to major consequences, including latency issues, frustrated customers, and up to hundreds of thousands of dollars lost every minute. When businesses lack precise insights into the demands of an event, they tend to overprovision their infrastructure.

While this preemptive approach ensures that the business is prepared, it comes at a considerable cost. Consequently, companies have been exploring more precise and efficient strategies to manage event-driven workloads. Event-based autoscaling provides a solution that is set to redefine how companies manage their infrastructure.

A Solution for Event-Based Autoscaling

A Smart Scaler presents an innovative solution for event-based autoscaling, addressing the inefficiencies of manual guesswork and the risks linked with inadequate provisioning. Proactively preparing resources for scheduled events ensures an improved customer experience while eliminating the costly implications of overprovisioning. With Smart Scaler, organizations can optimize their shared cloud resources more effectively, accommodating fluctuating workload patterns without unnecessary expenditures.  

Smart Scaler enables organizations to schedule scaling in advance. By leveraging historical data analysis and digital twin modeling, it scales individual microservices within an application, even when dealing with hundreds of microservices. By automatically analyzing service graphs and dependencies, Smart Scaler proportionally adjusts each microservice, ensuring optimal resource allocation without stressful site reliability engineering (SRE) work or overprovisioning.

This automated and standardized approach ensures efficient resource allocation, minimizing unnecessary costs while optimizing performance. Its capability to adapt to dynamic workload variations and continuously monitor the system providers’ users with a smooth and uninterrupted experience, even during sudden surges in demand. If an organization is expecting a two-fold increase in traffic during a sporting event, Smart Scaler can scale everything up and ready the infrastructure for the event. Then, it can also continuously monitor the workload, adjusting scaling as necessary to changes from the original assumptions, all in a controlled and cost-efficient manner.

Event-based autoscaling finds applications across various industries. Retailers, marketing teams during sales events like Black Friday, and B2B marketing for promotions can all benefit from this intelligent approach to infrastructure management. With Smart Scaler, PaaS providers such as authentication providers, can cope with important customer events like employee briefings. Furthermore, banks and government organizations, especially during tax filing deadlines, can leverage event-based autoscaling to ensure their services are prepared to handle increased demand.

Benefits of Event-Based Autoscaling

Smart Scaler event-based autoscaling capabilities offer several advantages:

• Stress-Free Scaling: Smart Scaler offers the ability to schedule scaling events, meaning you can prepare for specific events or daily variations in workload. For example, you can specify your busiest hours on a calendar basis and let Smart Scaler do the rest.
• No Overprovisioning: With precise scaling based on historical data and service dependencies, you no longer need to overprovision. This translates to significant cost savings and a reduced environmental footprint by decreasing energy consumption.
• Improved Customer Experience: By ensuring resources are ready for the event, you avoid latency issues and provide a seamless customer experience.
• Automation and AI: Smart Scaler leverages AI to continually monitor and adjust infrastructure based on your application's changing behavior. This adaptability is far more effective than manual adjustments, especially when app behaviors change.

A Deeper Dive Into Smart Scaler’s Features

Smart Scaler is designed to offer a seamless and user-friendly experience, equipped with intuitive scheduling features and AI-driven adjustments that effortlessly accommodate dynamic changes in application behavior. Leveraging Gen AI, the Smart Scaler predicts and generates appropriate scaling values in real-time, ensuring efficient and optimized performance. With its user-focused design, Smart Scaler provides a range of functionalities tailored to streamline the scaling process, such as seamless metrics ingestion from common data sources (i.e. Prometheus and DataDog, among others) and failsafe operation and safeguard (i.e. GitOps integration for human approval).

Now that you understand the concept of event-based autoscaling, let's explore the key features of Smart Scaler:

1. Scheduling at Specific Times
   Smart Scaler provides the flexibility to schedule scaling at specific times. You can align your infrastructure to meet anticipated workload variations, making it easy to prepare for events (webinars, earnings calls, etc.), promotional campaigns, and any situation that requires increased capacity.
2. AI-Powered Auto-Adjustment 
   Smart Scaler employs AI to automatically adjust to changes in your application's behavior, even during updates or changes in operation. In today's dynamic tech environment, this capability is crucial to ensure the system remains responsive and optimized, even in the face of evolving application behaviors, which might otherwise be challenging to manage manually.
3. Utilizing Reinforcement Learning
   Smart Scaler's approach is grounded in Reinforcement Learning (RL), a machine learning technique used for training language models like ChatGPT. Avesha uses it to train the scaling agent to operate autonomously and stay within a desired operating envelope. This advanced technology predicts the state of your system. It makes adjustments accordingly, ensuring that the system remains proactive in anticipating the state of the system, guaranteeing optimal performance and resource allocation at all times.
4. Simple Event-Based Autoscaling Setup
   Setting up event-based autoscaling with Smart Scaler is designed to be user-friendly. The product interface is intuitive, enabling you to define your event-based scaling parameters and preferences with ease. To facilitate this process, the platform offers comprehensive instructions and visual aids, including a series of user-friendly screenshots, ensuring a smooth and intuitive user experience.

Conclusion

Whether you're a retailer gearing up for Black Friday, a sports betting company preparing for a major game, or an organization with event-driven workloads, Smart Scaler can help you eliminate overprovisioning and ensure optimal performance during crucial moments.