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by DVassallo 2690 days ago
That's not the right way to do it. You shouldn't monitor how many instances you're running. You just need to determine how many instances you should be running based on your scaling driver (cpu, # of users, database connections, etc). Then you call the Auto Scaling SetDesiredCapacity API with the number, and it is idempotent[1]. If the AWS API is down, your fleet size just won't change.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/APIReference/API...
2 comments
icelancer 2690 days ago
> That's not the right way to do it.

The poster is aware of this, which is why they talked specifically what they did wrong.

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zepolen 2690 days ago
While the poster was aware of it, he did not provide a solution whereas DVassallo provided a valuable step by step on how to do it properly. Which may help others in the future.

Think long and hard why you felt it necessary to make your comment and what value it actually provided.

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icelancer 2689 days ago
> Think long and hard why you felt it necessary to make your comment and what value it actually provided.

Yeah, that's what I was telling the other poster in a nicer way. Same goes to you. You can provide advice without repeating criticism for no reason when the person specifically said they did something wrong.

And save me the lecturing on "long and hard." My comment has 15 upvotes, so it's pretty unlikely I'm the one off the mark in this conversation.

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zepolen 2689 days ago
> You can provide advice without repeating criticism for no reason when the person specifically said they did something wrong.

That statement is a joke, here it is reworded:

> A person should be invulnerable to criticism as long as they make a humbling remark.

Doesn't sound so great now does it.

Also, I'm not surprised you got 15 upvotes. This place has ceased to be a hacker forum for many years now. Too many eternal politically correct Septembers.

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icelancer 2689 days ago
A strawman argument + when your view is not popular, the environment must be the problem. Classic undefeatable argument. I'm surprised you have problems getting along here.
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zepolen 2688 days ago
> when your view is not popular, the environment must be the problem

You were the one using upvotes to validate your argument when it's a fact that posting a political opinion in either a left and right forum will net highly different responses. Of course the environment plays a part.

Won't even bother dissecting the first shot. Your arguments have been weak at best till now this final one was the final straw, man.

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samstave 2689 days ago
If this is still a pitfall for users of AWS ~5 years in.. then its not a fault of my communication...

You know what I think its a fault of:

Lack of a canonical DevOps "university" stemmed from SV startups.

DevOps at this point should not just be a degree -- it should be a freaking field of study and classes offered by YC.... Look at their pedigree of companies at scale. We should all make an effort to give back in this regard...

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svsucculents 2688 days ago
devops as a field of serious study is pretty pathetic. I wouldn't trust a devops 'grad' to do anything or know anything. But with the resurgence in certs and boot camps and other snake oil making $$ why not?
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samstave 2690 days ago
Yeah, like I said - this was a few years ago, and the system wasnt designed to be able to scale using ASGs at the time. (Fleet didnt yet exist, amd a bunch of other reasons) - but scaling was based on users and load complexity for the data we were handling -- this wasnt a web service.
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