Autoscaling now available
🧙
It's autoscalemagic.
Autoscaling for MySQL, web storage, and traffic is now available. Plans scale up when usage increases and down again when usage drops.
What it looks like. Just a little checkbox.
What autoscales, what doesn't
| Component | Autoscaling | Metric |
|---|---|---|
| MySQL | Yes | Storage |
| Web storage | Yes | Disk space |
| Traffic | Yes | Bandwidth |
| PHP | No | — |
| Jobs | No | — |
| Backups | No | — |
Autoscaling ON vs OFF
| Autoscaling | Fixed pricing | May go offline if exceeded |
|---|---|---|
| On | No | No |
| Off | Yes | Yes |
- Autoscaling is optional. You can turn it on and off at any time.
- See autoscaling docs for more details.
Getting started with autoscaling
New apps created from now on have autoscaling preselected. Existing environments created during the public BETA so far have autoscaling off (to not create surprises). To enable or disable autoscaling for an existing app environment:
- Go to our dashboard
- Navigate to your environment's components
- Toggle autoscaling on or off
- Choose a starting tier (XS keeps baseline costs low)
Pricing considerations
With autoscaling enabled, monthly invoices may fluctuate. This is usually minimal thanks to tiered pricing. Unlike per-MiB billing, tiers are designed so plan changes happen rarely. Monitoring and pro-rated costs are visible in the dashboard.
- Minimize costs: Start on XS plans with autoscaling on. The lowest possible base that scales only when needed.
- Minimize price fluctuation: Book a larger base plan. Tiered pricing means most months you won't move a tier anyway.
- Hard budget cap: Disable autoscaling. Get email warnings before hitting limits.
Notifications
We are also intoducing a first iteration of metric notification with this release. With autoscaling disabled, the system will send an email to all technical contacts of the app about the approaching limit. To avoid sending too many emails, this email is only sent once a month per environment. It will be sent the first time you're close to the limit.
How we got there
This release was a big technical challenge. Changing resources without interruptions in an environment that has persistent storage isn't exactlty easy. Some thinking outside the box and a lot of communication was required to get it right. But we are happy with the result. It's an important milestone for future updates.
Outlook
Today, autoscaling is limited to usage-based components with clear signals for when to scale. For compute performance components such as PHP and jobs, autoscaling is more complex and specific per project. It needs careful thresholds and notification settings.
Follow this blog for future updates. We have a dedicated RSS for posts tagged as changelog.
Other updates
- New pricing details page: fortrabbit.com/pricing/details
- More payment types: SEPA direct debit, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Klarna …
- Fixed issues when installing LightningCSS and Bun (during deployment)
- Added an early Tempest install guide
- PHP processes got a small bump
- Many minor improvements and bug fixes