Google Compute Engine Autoscaler Service is Broadly Available

Google Compute Engine (GCE), the IaaS component of Google Cloud Platform got an Autoscaler feature. Currently in beta, Autoscaler adds elasticity to cloud deployments.

Google moved the Autoscaler feature into beta making it more broadly available. Google Compute Engine moved into GA in last December. Since then Google has been adding new features.

Autoscaler can dynamically scale-out or scale-in a deployment. Based on the load condition, it can add more instances (scale-out) or drop existing instances (scale-in). The service can adjust the number of instances based on CPU load, target utilization or based on the metrics defined by Cloud Monitoring service. Autoscaler can also be associated with HTTP load balancer or network load balancer that evenly balance the traffic across a set of homogeneous instances.

This feature was demonstrated at the recent Google Cloud Platform Live event hosted on 4th November in San Francisco.

Wix.com, a popular self-service website-building service runs on Google Cloud Platform. Golan Parashi, Wix.com's Infrastructure Team Lead, mentioned how Google uses heuristics to determine how many instances to add at one time to hit demand, “reducing [our] expenses, while giving us confidence that Google will manage the appropriate number of machines, even when a spike occurs."

While in beta, Google Compute Engine Autoscaler service is broadly available to developers but is not covered under any SLA.