Rackspace Auto Scale Control Panel User Guide - Introduction

Welcome to Rackspace Auto Scale, the easy way to scale your cloud resources up or down in response to an increase or decrease in overall workload or based on your defined thresholds.

What you will learn

After reading this guide you will understand:

  • Auto Scale core concepts
  • Auto Scale options and how group configurations affect policy execution
  • How to use Auto Scale control panel to create a scaling group and policies

What you can do with Rackspace Auto Scale

You can use Rackspace Auto Scale to perform the following tasks:

  • Create a policy to add more servers at a specific time on a recurring
    basis or just one time; use cron to set the schedule, or use a webhook to
    respond to an event and trigger a policy; and set a policy to scale back
    down
  • Add and remove a specific number of servers or a percentage of your total
    resources
  • Support your dedicated servers by adding - and removing - cloud servers based
    on a schedule

Prerequisites

Before you can use Rackspace Auto Scale, you must have the following
prerequisites:

  • A Rackspace cloud account. To sign up go to the Rackspace Public Cloud signup
    page
    .
  • A server image or images with all needed applications and settings. You can
    create your images with the
    API,
    through the Cloud Control Panel or use external applications such as Chef,
    Puppet, or Salt.
  • (Optional) A load balancer. One is allowed per each group of 25
    server images. To create a load balancer with the API or the
    Cloud Control Panel, See the Cloud Load Balancers Developer
    Guide

    for information about using the API.

What's next

Concepts.

User Guide sections