
When Autoscaling Becomes Auto-Spending: Fixing Cloud Efficiency Gaps
Autoscaling was supposed to be the silver bullet for cloud efficiency. Provisioning more resources during high demand and releasing them when demand falls. In principle, it promised both performance and cost control. In practice, many organizations are encountering the opposite. Cloud costs continue to rise, even as workloads fluctuate. Because their auto-scaling setups scale up fast, but scale down painfully slowly. The result is a phenomenon where auto-scaling transforms from a cost optimization tool into a cost multiplication factor. Auto-scaling is intended to maintain performance by provisioning resources in response to demand. This works well during traffic surges - applications remain responsive and service continuity is preserved. Most auto-scaling configurations are tuned to scale up quickly. They monitor core infrastructure metrics such as CPU utilization (e.g., >70%), request rates (e.g., >500 RPS), or memory usage.