Plan for scale

You should plan for variations in capacity and traffic by automating scaling events. By using monitoring and alerting to track your infrastructure and service resource usage, you can proactively and dynamically respond to varying demands for your services, ensuring more reliability and resilience.

Most major cloud providers have native auto-scaling features. You can use Terraform to manage the autoscaling configurations through the auto-scaling resources, such as the aws_autoscaling_group resource.

Monitoring cost is an important factor when planning for scale. HashiCorp's Sentinel is a policy-as-code framework that allows you to introduce logic-based policy decisions to your systems. Codifying your policies offers the same benefits as IaC, allowing for collaborative development, visibility, and predictability in your operations. You can use Sentinel to help manage your infrastructure spending.

HashiCorp resources:

• Identify common metrics
• Scale servers
• Scale container orchestrators and workloads
• Monitor infrastructure cost with Sentinel
• Learn about HashiCorp Sentinel

External resources:

• AWS Auto scaling
• Azure Auto scaling
• GCP Auto scaling instances and load balancing

Next steps

In this section of Scale resources, you learned how to implement automated scaling strategies to handle varying capacity and traffic demands while maintaining cost control and system reliability. Plan for scale is part of the Optimize systems.

Refer to the following documents to learn more about scaling and optimization:

• Monitor system health to track your infrastructure performance
• Scale resources for additional scaling strategies
• Automate your workflows to implement automated scaling processes