[hefeweizen]

In the context of Docker Swarm and Kubernetes, autoscaling refers to container level scaling ie. given a set of nodes, any autoscaling function would manage the number of containers that are currently running on these nodes.

For instance/node level autoscaling (which is closer to what you need), I would recommend using the autoscaling features provided by AWS/Google Cloud.

[eblanshey]

> I would recommend using the autoscaling features provided by AWS/Google Cloud

It would have to be integrated with Kubernetes though -- when we push a new docker container, the container would need to be updated on any new machines created. We'll look into GCP's autoscale solution.

[dalailambda]

The node level autoscaling doesn't need to be integrated with kubernetes, all it needs to do is create a new instance and register it as a node through normal channels.

Even if you don't need autoscaling, I'd suggest still using autoscaling groups and setting it to a fixed number of instances, so that instances will automatically get restarted if they go down.

[hefeweizen]

Yeah, any new machine instance has to join the Swarm (and its equivalent in kubernetes-speak). But that can be decoupled from kubernetes or docker swarm mode.

As for image management, it would depend on how you would like to propagate new images. With a private docker registry, you could potentially point each new instance to the registry and take care of propagating new images. I favor this approach since it keeps everything separate and easier to manage.