[brightball]

One thing to consider is that DO is really, really good at vertical scaling. You can have about 1 minute or less downtime on an instance (basically boot time) to restart it as a bigger instance (RAM/CPU) as long as you don't grow the HD at the same time.

This is counter to most horizontal scaling strategies but it's really about the same. When you add more servers you're essentially just adding more CPUs and RAM via VMs. Being able to do it on the same machines minus any configuration time or provisioning time is really slick (especially for DBs).

Setting up a load balancer in front of a few instances that could take advantage of rolling vertical scaling would be a spin on autoscaling that played to one of DO's real strengths.

[Ambroos]

That looks nice until it doesn't work. We regularly see 30 minute event processing when doing flexible upgrades of Droplets (and the same when scaling back down). It's not safe, since the resize isn't guaranteed to be fast and you have no way to abort it once it's started. Sounds good in theory, not reliable enough to use in practice.

[hackerboos]

Isn't this what the flexible IP is for?

You create a new droplet concurrently the one running and then flip the IP to point to the new droplet. No downtime.

[leemalmac]

You have to have the a server with the same configuration or a snapshot or provision a new one...

[leemalmac]

Using snapshot to create a new droplet and update some configuration files should be fast either. Probably, longer than 1 minute but not much, I guess.