Understand automatic scaling for Spot Fleet

Target tracking scaling – Increase or decrease
 the current capacity of the fleet by targeting a value for a specific metric. This is similar to the way that your thermostat maintains the temperature of your home—you select the desired temperature and the thermostat does the rest.

Step scaling – Increase or decrease the current capacity of the fleet based on a set of scaling adjustments, known as step adjustments, that vary based on the size of the alarm breach.

Scheduled scaling – Increase or decrease the current capacity of the fleet based on the date and time.

Instance weighting – If you're using instance weighting, keep in mind that Spot Fleet can exceed the target capacity as needed. Fulfilled capacity can be a floating-point number but target capacity must be an integer, so Spot Fleet rounds up to the next integer. You must take these behaviors into account when you look at the outcome of a scaling policy when an alarm is triggered. For example, suppose that the target capacity is 30, the fulfilled capacity is 30.1, and the scaling policy subtracts 1. When the alarm is triggered, the automatic scaling process subtracts 1 from 30.1 to get 29.1 and then rounds it up to 30, so no scaling action is taken. As another example, suppose that you selected instance weights of 2, 4, and 8, and a target capacity of 10, but no weight 2 instances were available so Spot Fleet provisioned instances of weights 4 and 8 for a fulfilled capacity of 12. If the scaling policy decreases target capacity by 20% and an alarm is triggered, the automatic scaling process subtracts 12*0.2 from 12 to get 9.6 and then rounds it up to 10, so no scaling action is taken.

Cooldown period – The scaling policies that you create for Spot Fleet support a cooldown period. This is the number of seconds after a scaling activity completes where previous trigger-related scaling activities can influence future scaling events. For scale-out policies, while the cooldown period is in effect, the capacity that has been added by the previous scale-out event that initiated the cooldown is calculated as part of the desired capacity for the next scale out. The intention is to continuously (but not excessively) scale out. For scale in policies, the cooldown period is used to block subsequent scale in requests until it has expired. The intention is to scale in conservatively to protect your application's availability. However, if another alarm triggers a scale-out policy during the cooldown period after a scale-in, automatic scaling scales out your scalable target immediately.

Use detailed monitoring – We recommend that you scale based on instance metrics with a 1-minute frequency because that ensures a faster response to utilization changes. Scaling on metrics with a 5-minute frequency can result in slower response time and scaling on stale metric data. To send metric data for your instances to CloudWatch in 1-minute periods, you must specifically enable detailed monitoring. For more information, see Manage detailed monitoring for your EC2 instances and Create a Spot Fleet request using defined parameters (console).

AWS CLI – If you use the AWS CLI for configuring scaling for Spot Fleet, you'll use the application-autoscaling CLI. For more information, see the following resources: