That looks nice until it doesn't work. We regularly see 30 minute event processing when doing flexible upgrades of Droplets (and the same when scaling back down). It's not safe, since the resize isn't guaranteed to be fast and you have no way to abort it once it's started. Sounds good in theory, not reliable enough to use in practice.
Re:Autoscaling for Digital Ocean?
by hackerboos on Friday April 15, 2016 @09:15AM
(#11503989)
Isn't this what the flexible IP is for?
You create a new droplet concurrently the one running and then flip the IP to point to the new droplet. No downtime.
You have to have the a server with the same configuration or a snapshot or provision a new one...
This is counter to most horizontal scaling strategies but it's really about the same. When you add more servers you're essentially just adding more CPUs and RAM via VMs. Being able to do it on the same machines minus any configuration time or provisioning time is really slick (especially for DBs).
Setting up a load balancer in front of a few instances that could take advantage of rolling vertical scaling would be a spin on autoscaling that played to one of DO's real strengths.