Welcome to Rackspace Auto Scale, the easy way to scale your cloud resources up or down in response to an increase or decrease in overall workload or based on your defined thresholds.
What you will learn#
After reading this guide you will understand:
Auto Scale core concepts
Auto Scale options and how group configurations affect policy execution
How to use Auto Scale control panel to create a scaling group and policies
What you can do with Rackspace Auto Scale#
You can use Rackspace Auto Scale to perform the following tasks:
Create a policy to add more servers at a specific time on a recurring basis or just one time; use cron to set the schedule, or use a webhook to respond to an event and trigger a policy; and set a policy to scale back down
Add and remove a specific number of servers or a percentage of your total resources
Support your dedicated servers by adding - and removing - cloud servers based on a schedule
Prerequisites#
Before you can use Rackspace Auto Scale, you must have the following prerequisites:
A Rackspace cloud account. To sign up go to the Rackspace Public Cloud signup page.
A server image or images with all needed applications and settings. You can create your images with the API, through the Cloud Control Panel or use external applications such as Chef, Puppet, or Salt.
(Optional) A load balancer. One is allowed per each group of 25 server images. To create a load balancer with the API or the Cloud Control Panel, See the Cloud Load Balancers Developer Guide for information about using the API.