Why metric choice matters: concurrency, latency, or queue depth

Designing autoscale policies: targets, hysteresis, and step controls

Taming cold starts and absorbing traffic bursts

Controlling cost: caps, forecasting, and observability

Practical implementation checklist and policy templates

The economics of autoscaling are a hard constraint: scale too slowly and your p99 latency explodes; scale too liberally and your monthly bill becomes the incident. For serverless workloads the single best lever you have is a well-chosen control signal and a disciplined policy that ties that signal to business SLIs and cost guardrails.

The symptoms you already live with: unpredictable spikes that trigger throttles or 429s, p99 latency regressions when cold starts coincide with bursts, and surprise line items on the monthly invoice because some functions were left unconstrained.…