Comment by ThinkBeat

This is about penny pinching. If you have created a system that cannot autoscale fast enough, then the triggers for when it does scale up should be much lower.

I also think that enormous amounts of headache can be saved by spinning up beefy instances and including scaling it up before scaling out.

A big nice beefy instance gets over 50% of whatever metric is used spin up a new one. Make it an even beefer version.

Scaling "just in time", persumably to lower costs, is much more of a gamble and a lot more complicated.