The day someone comes up with solid evidence that they are using the system to skim money off unsuspecting customers is Amazon's last day as a hosting company.

Trust of a web host is of paramount importance. I know a lot of people who stuck with more expensive hosts just because they trust them and have a good working relationship with them.

According to the documentation, Auto Scaling is based on input from CloudWatch (see the dimensions parameter): http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AutoScaling/latest/Develop...

re: trusting Amazon to scale, as they say in the release notes, they provide a detailed audit of scaling activity. After all the work Amazon has done to help their customers, I doubt they're interested in grabbing a little cash from inappropriate scaling.

Unscrupulousness is easier if the other party is complicit: much more profitable to make people want to lower the thresholds before spinning up a new server ("We recommend setting the trigger when your CPU load is 0.1 and disk iops is 10/s") versus the gauche act of the visible rip-off.