Scaling infrastructure efficiently is one of the most critical tasks for engineering teams. Too many resources waste money; too few risk performance bottlenecks and downtime. With Aptible’s new in-app Container Right-Size Recommendations, you can easily optimize your apps and databases based on real-time usage data, ensuring your infrastructure operates at peak performance and cost efficiency.

How it works

Aptible’s Container Right-Size Recommendations simplify container resource management for app services and databases by providing actionable insights. These recommendations are:

• Updated Daily: Recommendations reflect your app and database’s most recent usage patterns, ensuring they remain accurate and actionable.

• Based on Resource Utilization: Based on usage over the last two weeks, RAM recommendations are derived from maximum usage, while CPU recommendations are based on the 95th percentile (p95) of usage. The recommendations are designed with performance in mind, ensuring optimal resource allocation without compromising your app or database's reliability and responsiveness.

  
  

Rightsizing your app & database containers

Aptible makes it easy to rightsize your container usage in the following ways:

• Manually Scaling: Use the Auto-Fill Changes button to quickly apply suggested adjustments to container resources. This approach allows you to manually update container configurations immediately.

  

• Vertical Autoscaling for Apps | Enterprise Plan Only: With the Vertical Autoscaling feature, container resources adjust dynamically based on CPU and RAM usage. This feature ensures consistent performance and cost efficiency without manual engineering work. This feature is only available on the Enterprise plan. See docs for more information, or contact Aptible support to get started

  

Why we focus on vertical scaling

Vertical scaling applies to both apps and databases, making it a versatile and impactful strategy for managing container resources. Horizontal scaling, by contrast, applies only to apps on Aptible, making vertical scaling the most comprehensive solution for optimizing your entire stack.

Day-to-day, both horizontal and vertical scaling can effectively increase capacity and handle traffic. However, when it comes to rightsizing containers, focusing on container size and profile selection often leads to the most cost-effective and performance-optimized outcomes.

Considerations horizontal scaling

Horizontal scaling also has its place in an effective scaling strategy. While vertical scaling is great for optimizing individual containers, horizontal scaling offers additional benefits:

• High Availability: For critical workloads, we recommend scaling app containers to 2 or more containers. With multiple containers, Aptible automatically deploys your apps across multiple availability zones (AZs) for fault tolerance and redundancy.

• Distributed Workloads: Horizontal scaling can distribute traffic and workloads across containers, improving overall performance under heavy demand.

By combining vertical scaling for resource optimization and horizontal scaling for redundancy and reliability, Aptible ensures that your applications meet both performance and availability requirements.

Interested in Horizontal Autoscaling? Aptible is currently offering Horizontal Autoscaling based on CPU in BETA? See docs for more information, or contact Aptible support to get started.