Scaling Policy Types
~8 min read
Target tracking, step scaling, and scheduled scaling — three ways to tell an Auto Scaling Group when to act.
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Key points
- •Target tracking: declare a target metric value, AWS handles the math — the recommended default
- •Step scaling: manually define thresholds and exact instance-count changes at each — more control, more tuning
- •Scheduled scaling: pre-set capacity ahead of known time-based patterns, avoiding reactive scaling's boot-time lag
- •These policy types can be layered together, not just used exclusively one at a time