Scaling and Autoscaling
There are multiple dimensions of scaling on Fly.io.
- Ensuring the application has instances running in one or more regions
- Increasing the CPU cores and memory size of application instances
- Alternate scaling models with autoscaling
Regions and Scaling
Your Fly application runs on servers in a pool of regions, selected from our available regions. That pool, which you can configure, represents the regions your app can be deployed in.
When you deploy an application for the first time, we pick a first region to deploy in. Our selections are simple:
- If you’re turbo-charging a Heroku application, we pick regions close to the Heroku application (currently, this means
iad
for US Heroku applications (howdy!), andams
for European applications (hallo!). - Otherwise, you're prompted to select an initial region when you run
fly launch
You can confirm this by running fly regions list
.
fly regions list
Region Pool:
lhr
Backup Region:
Backup regions are disabled by default as they cause more problems than they solve.
The create command, in this case, was issued in the UK, so London (LHR-London Heathrow) is the closest region.
Backup Regions
Continuing our previous example: if for any reason your application can't be deployed in LHR, Fly will attempt to bring it up in either ams
(Amsterdam) or fra
(Frankfurt). Users won't notice this! They’re directed to the nearest running instance automatically. Backup Regions are selected based on the geographical closeness of the regions selected for your region pool.
Modifying the Region Pool
You can build your own region pool easily.
fly regions add ord iad
addsord
andiad
to your region pool.fly regions remove ord
removesord
from your region pool.
Both commands simply take a space-separated list of regions to add or remove.
Count Scaling
Now that we have control over where our application runs, we can talk about how many instances of your app are running.
Your application has a “scale count”. The scale count defaults to 1, meaning 1 instance of your application runs on Fly, in one of the regions in your pool.
If you want to run more than 1 instance, change your scale count with the fly scale count
command. fly scale count 3
tells us to run 3 instances of your application.
When you bump up your scale count, we’ll place your app in different regions (based on your region pool). If there are three regions in the pool and the count is set to six, there will be two app instances in each region.
You can see your current scaling parameters with fly scale show
.
fly scale show
VM Size: shared-cpu-1x
VM Memory: 512 MB
Count: 4
This application uses the shared-cpu-1x (one shared CPU) VM size, with 512MB of RAM for each instance and there should be four instances of it created.
Scaling Virtual Machines
Each application instance on Fly runs in a virtual machine. The number of cores and amount of memory available in the virtual machine can be set for all application instances using the fly scale vm
command.
Viewing the Current VM Size
Using fly scale show
on its own will display the details of the application's current VM sizing.
fly scale show
Size: shared-cpu-1x
CPU Cores: 1
Memory: 256 MB
Max Per Region:
It shows the size (shared-cpu-1x
), number of CPUs, and memory (in GB or MB).
Viewing Available VM Sizes
The fly platform vm-sizes
command will display the various sizes with cores and memory and current pricing:
fly platform vm-sizes
NAME CPU CORES MEMORY
shared-cpu-1x 1 256 MB
dedicated-cpu-1x 1 2 GB
dedicated-cpu-2x 2 4 GB
dedicated-cpu-4x 4 8 GB
dedicated-cpu-8x 8 16 GB
The CPU Cores column shows how many vCPU cores will be allocated to the virtual machine.
CPU Types are either shared or dedicated. In a nutshell: shared CPU instances run lighter-weight tasks but potentially share CPU with other tenants. Shared VMs can have up to 2GB of memory. Dedicated CPU instances handle more demanding applications and can scale to 64GB of memory.
Upgrading a VM
You can easily change the type of your VMs. Just add the required size name to fly scale vm
and we’ll take care of the rest. For example to go from shared-cpu-1x
to dedicated-cpu-1x
is:
fly scale vm dedicated-cpu-1x
Scaled VM size to dedicated-cpu-1x
CPU Cores: 1
Memory: 2 GB
Adjusting a VM's Memory
The fly scale memory
command lets you directly set the VM memory allocation, in MB. For example, if we wanted our app to use 1GB of memory we'd run:
fly scale memory 1024
Scaled VM Memory size to 1 GB
CPU Cores: 1
Memory: 1 GB
You can also change the VM type and memory size at the same time. The fly scale vm
command can take an additional memory flag which specifies the megabytes of RAM to be allocated to the VM. For example, if we wanted to allocate 4GB of RAM to our application and switch to a dedicated CPU option, we'd run:
fly scale vm dedicated-cpu-1x --memory 4096
Scaled VM size to dedicated-cpu-1x
CPU Cores: 1
Memory: 4 GB
Viewing the Application's Scaled Status
To view where the instances of a Fly application are currently running, use fly status
:
fly status
App
Name = hellofly
Owner = personal
Version = 318
Status = running
Hostname = hellofly.fly.dev
Deployment Status
ID = 8c3137c2-94d2-5fb6-e1ff-d46608def053
Version = v318
Status = running
Description = Deployment is running
Instances = 3 desired, 3 placed, 2 healthy, 0 unhealthy
Instances
ID VERSION REGION DESIRED STATUS HEALTH CHECKS RESTARTS CREATED
a592ecf4 318 iad run running 1 total, 1 passing 0 1m7s ago
382dd4ce 318 lhr run running 1 total, 1 passing 0 1m33s ago
075c8c53 318 sjc run running 1 total, 1 passing 0 3m1s ago
Autoscaling
Autoscaling is based on a pool of regions where the application can be run. Using a selected model, the system will then create at least the minimum number of application instances across those regions. The model will then be able to create instances up to the maximum count. The min and max are global parameters for the scaling. There are two scaling modes, Standard and Balanced.
Standard: Instances of the application, up to the minimum count, are evenly distributed among the regions in the pool. They are not relocated in response to traffic. New instances are added where there is demand, up to the maximum count.
Balanced: Instances of the application are, at first, evenly distributed among the regions in the pool up to the minimum count. Where traffic is high in a particular region, new instances will be created there and then, when the maximum count of instances has been used, instances will be moved from other regions to that region. This movement of instances is designed to balance the supply of compute power with demand for it.
Disabled: By default, autoscaling is in Disabled mode and count-based scaling is in operation. You can turn autoscaling on by setting the autoscale mode to
standard
orbalanced
To determine what the current autoscale settings of an application are, run fly autoscale show
:
fly autoscale show
Scale Mode: Standard
Min Count: 1
Max Count: 10
This scaling plan sees a standard, even distribution on instances, with a minimum of 1 instance and up to 10 instances that can be created on-demand.
Modifying the Autoscaling Plan
You can switch the plan by calling fly autoscale and then selecting disabled, balanced or standard.
fly autoscale standard
The balanced
and standard
commands can take parameters that control the model, specifically max
and min
.
For example if you want to run at least three instances in a balanced
model, but no more than ten, you would run:
fly autoscale balanced min=3 max=10
Scale Mode: Balanced
Min Count: 3
Max Count: 10
And if you wanted to change that to a standard model with a minimum number of 5 instances, you would run:
fly autoscale standard min=5
Scale Mode: Standard
Min Count: 5
Max Count: 10
The autoscale show command will display the rules that currently apply to the app:
fly autoscale show
Scale Mode: Standard
Min Count: 5
Max Count: 10
You can continue to see your current scaling parameters using fly scale show
.
fly scale show
VM Resources for hellofly
VM Size: shared-cpu-1x
VM Memory: 256 MB
Count: 5
The count field here now shows the number of instances currently running.
You can also turn off autoscaling and return to the recommended count-scaling option by disabling autoscaling:
fly autoscale disable
Scale Mode: Disabled