Google Compute Engine launches Autoscaler out of beta

Google today announced that the autoscaling feature for its Google Compute Engine cloud infrastructure service is now out of beta and generally available to everyone. Google first announced the Autoscaler back in November 2014 at its Google Cloud Platform Live event in San Francisco.

Now developers can automate the process of provisioning more or less cloud infrastructure. They can make rules based on average CPU utilization, the number of web requests per second, and other metrics.

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“With Google Compute Engine Autoscaler you’re able to dynamically scale the number of instances in response to load conditions,” Google Compute Engine product managers Jerzy Foryciarz and Scott Van Woudenberg wrote in a blog post today. “Simply define the ideal utilization of your group of compute instances, and Autoscaler will add instances when needed and remove them when traffic is low. This saves you money and headaches since you don’t have to buy and hold spare capacity. Furthermore, Autoscaler can scale from zero to millions of requests per second in minutes without the need to pre-warm.”

Other public clouds, like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, can also be set up to automatically scale based on usage. Which is why it wasn’t surprising to see Google introduce it last year. In addition to rolling out new features, the Google cloud also occasionally cuts the prices of its raw cloud infrastructure.

Documentation for the new Autoscaler is here.