About the Autoscale API

The Rackspace Autoscale API enables developers to interact with the Rackspace Autoscale service through a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) web service interface.

You use the Autoscale service to automatically scale resources in response to an increase or decrease in overall workload based on user-defined policies. You can set up a schedule for launching Auto Scale or define an event that is triggered by Cloud Monitoring. You can also specify a minimum and maximum number of cloud servers, the amount of resources that you want to increase or decrease, and the thresholds in Cloud Monitoring that trigger the scaling activities.

To use Autoscale through the API, you submit API requests to define a scaling group consisting of cloud servers and cloud load balancers or RackConnect v3. Then you define policies, either schedule-based or monitoring-based. For monitoring-based policies, you define cloud monitoring alerts to watch the group’s activity, and you define scaling rules to change the scaling group’s configuration in response to alerts. For schedule-based policies, you simply set a schedule. Because you can change a scaling group’s configuration in response to changing workloads, you can begin with a minimal cloud configuration and grow only when the cost of that growth is justified.