Just curious, why did you migrate from Flex to Standard? Only for the 10X price/performance boost for infrequently accessed services?
PS: Regarding automagically handling spikes I have a warning that might be useful for you.
The way AE load balancer works is that it:
0. A request comes.
1. AE checks for available instance. If none available:
2. Spins up new instance.
3. !!! Assigns the request to that instance.
4. Waits for /_ah/warmup to finish.
5. Adds that instance to its serving pool so other requests may be routed there as well.
Note that step 4 is after step 3, so at least one request will wait for /_ah/warmup. So occasionally you will see requests with high latency (if your warmup is slow, of course). Our latency requirements were quite high, so we ended up switching to manual scaling and heavily over-provision to handle spikes. That costed us good money, though.
PS: Regarding automagically handling spikes I have a warning that might be useful for you. The way AE load balancer works is that it:
0. A request comes.
1. AE checks for available instance. If none available:
2. Spins up new instance.
3. !!! Assigns the request to that instance.
4. Waits for /_ah/warmup to finish.
5. Adds that instance to its serving pool so other requests may be routed there as well.
Note that step 4 is after step 3, so at least one request will wait for /_ah/warmup. So occasionally you will see requests with high latency (if your warmup is slow, of course). Our latency requirements were quite high, so we ended up switching to manual scaling and heavily over-provision to handle spikes. That costed us good money, though.