I have the opposite question: who is on the cloud and has such consistent workloads they never need to scale up or down? I'm sure those users exist but they must be the minority, right?
Well … I don't have a consistent workload (our load is highly diurnal, enough so that you can spot lunch) but we just mostly don't deal with the complexity of it. For many things, we just alloc 3 VMs, across 3 zones — we really don't need more?¹ — and so the next scaling step is to 0.
¹I think the thing here is that for most of the jobs I've worked … we're really not doing "big" things. The complexity is all business logic or how the product does what it does, not scale.
(We do provision some CI compute on-demand, so that scales with load, so it's not all fixed.)
I think the last "ooh, fun compute!" thing I did was like almost 10 years ago now where we had a huge job that needed to run. But it was sort of the opposite of the stuff in this thread: since it wasn't on-demand, we could run it whenever. That ended up being at night on spot-priced VMs, when they were cheap.
¹I think the thing here is that for most of the jobs I've worked … we're really not doing "big" things. The complexity is all business logic or how the product does what it does, not scale.
(We do provision some CI compute on-demand, so that scales with load, so it's not all fixed.)
I think the last "ooh, fun compute!" thing I did was like almost 10 years ago now where we had a huge job that needed to run. But it was sort of the opposite of the stuff in this thread: since it wasn't on-demand, we could run it whenever. That ended up being at night on spot-priced VMs, when they were cheap.