Softlayer Autoscaling

One thing I am using more and more in my Softlayer environments is the autoscaling feature. Having the ability to meet compute demands in peak times, and reduce costs when it’s quiet is invaluable. Sounds good right? So what actually is Softlayers autoscaling feature?

Autoscale is a free service configured from the Softlayer portal or the Softlayer API. It allows you to scale in and out based on different healthcheck style policies. More commonly than not, the autoscale pool will be behind a local or global load balancer. However, this is not a requirement. Applications that can scale in a cluster can be done in a pool without any load balancing.

I recently setup an autoscale pool for a project I am working on codenamed ‘Pheonix’. It is incredibly simple to do and along with some pre defined scripts and images (which I will show below). When scaling out, there is 0 manual intervention involved when a server is added.

Hit the link below for a walkthrough!