Boot time is the number one factor in your success with auto-scaling. The smaller your boot time, the smaller your prediction window needs to be. Ex. If your boot time is five minutes, you need to predict what your traffic will be in five minutes, but if you can boot in 20 seconds, you only need to predict 20 seconds ahead. By definition your predictions will be more accurate the smaller the window is.
But! Autoscaling serves two purposes. One is to address load spikes. The other is to reduce costs with scaling down. What this solution does is trade off some of the cost savings by prewarming the EBS volumes and then paying for them.
This feels like a reasonable tradeoff if you can justify the cost with better auto-scaling.
And if you're not autoscaling, it's still worth the cost if the trade off is having your engineers wait around for instance boots.
But! Autoscaling serves two purposes. One is to address load spikes. The other is to reduce costs with scaling down. What this solution does is trade off some of the cost savings by prewarming the EBS volumes and then paying for them.
This feels like a reasonable tradeoff if you can justify the cost with better auto-scaling.
And if you're not autoscaling, it's still worth the cost if the trade off is having your engineers wait around for instance boots.