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by erulabs 3000 days ago
This seems interesting and sounds like a fun project - but... How many EC2 instances can just be turned off and on? If they can, they're probably part of an autoscaling group and already scale based on required capacity... Or they're workstations and can be turned off on a schedule (as mentioned in the article), ie: work hours only.

As much as I want to, I can't think of a purpose for this. Would be fun as a Kubernetes scheduler! :D
3 comments
sdrothrock 3000 days ago
> How many EC2 instances can just be turned off and on?

I could actually imagine situations where you have loads that also follow a schedule -- for example, if you have a ton of data and customers can schedule summary generation/analyses, a lot of them will tend to schedule them on the first of the month (that is, after the last month has ended).

In a case like that with a predictable load, you could boot up a bunch of instances a bit before the end of the last day of a month, then turn them off (to go back to normal loads) a bit into the second day of the new month.

Machine learning could help you pick out other peaks, like say, every Monday or Sunday.

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alfanick 3000 days ago
> In a case like that with a predictable load, you could boot up a bunch of instances a bit before the end of the last day of a month, then turn them off (to go back to normal loads) a bit into the second day of the new month.

If it's predictable, no need for machine learning at all.

> "Machine learning could help you pick out other peaks, like say, every Monday or Sunday."

Or human can script around it, like you just did.

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prakashmanden 2998 days ago
In our view combination of machine learning and elastic provisioning in public clouds is incredibly powerful and will be fundamental to resource provisioning in public clouds. As environments become large/complex/dynamic, there will be no easy way to monitor provisioning vs utilization and adjust them. Machine learning driven resource provisioning will become a necessity. This is only one example of such possibilities.
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zitterbewegung 3000 days ago
I don't know how to setup an autoscaler group on EC2. But if I used this wouldn't I not have to set one up? What if you don't have perfect information about your fleet and some instances are workstations?
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