This feature is in alpha. While the feature should be stable, it may be changed or removed without prior notice. As such we do not recommend using this feature in any automated pipelines. During this time we greatly appreciate any feedback as we continue to finalize the implementation. You can reach us at support@architect.io.

Services will sometimes need to be scaled horizontally in order to handle more traffic, and Architect makes that easy through a few simple methods. Read on to find out how to quickly scale your services.

Services cannot be scaled up when using an environment running on the shared “architect” cluster; the funtionality is only available for private clusters.

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Scale command

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Scaling up and down

Whether or not services are already running, the scale command can be used to add scaling settings to an environment for a particular service of a component. If the service is running, the scale command will immediately scale the service running in the environment to the number of replicas specified. This is especially useful when the number of replicas of a service should differ between environments.

If the react demo project was deployed to an environment called “scaling-example” following the steps in the README, all services will be started with a default replica count of 1. If for some reason the app needs to be scaled up, it can be done with the following command:

architect scale app --component react --environment scaling-example --replicas 2

You should see a confirmation in green text that scaling was completed and that the scaling settings for the environment were updated. If you check out the page for the environment graph on the Architect Cloud you’ll notice that the number of replicas for the particular service has increased to two. Scaling back down can be accomplished with a similar command:

architect scale app --component react --environment scaling-example --replicas 1

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Clearing scaling settings

When the scale command is run, it will configure the environment to scale the service to the specified number of replicas for all future deployments. To clear the environment’s scaling settings for the app service, run the command with the --clear flag like so:

architect scale app --component react --environment scaling-example --clear

Note that using the --clear flag will have no effect on the number of currently-running replicas.

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replicas component config property

If a service of a component should have a certain number of replicas across all environments, the replicas field of a service config can be used. Setting the number of replicas with the scale command will override the number of replicas set in the component config file.

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Autoscaling

You can set scaling rules for CPU and memory for a service. This will allow them to automatically scale as needed. Below is an example of an architect.yml file with scaling rules set for max and min replicas, and the amount of memory and CPU usage for each replica:

cpu: 1
    memory: 1GB
    scaling:
      min_replicas: 1
      max_replicas: 3
      metrics:
        memory: 80 # 80%
        cpu: 75 # 75%
ObservabilityManaged services