Why is there no autoscaling?
As someone working in IT I barely see a service that doesn't. Every wannabe startup that dreams big has it implemented "just in case" even if they only have 20 users so that they can't be killed by a random reddit post.
However a billion dollar company with millions of users who JUST had a data center move and upgraded their infrastructure is unable to implement such a thing. What exactly is the reason for this? Whenever I read a post of Yoshida telling people there is an X amount of instances limit i cringe inside because it just isn't necessary.
Wouldn't it be an amazing world if you could simply create new servers on demand if the server load get's too big to handle and remove servers automatically when loads lessen so that you don't pay for resources you don't need? It's not even complicated either!
This game has enough servers to guarantee that there is a pre-configured server setup script in place to set up a new instance, login, whatever server without any user input. All that's left to do is create a script that reads the data of the server monitoring software and spawns additional servers if the load goes over a certain threshold, and removes them if it falls below the threshold again. A 12 year old could write that.
Databases might be a little harder to do but even those can be spawned automatically with auto-replication and join the fray on demand. I just don't get it.
Since I have no hands on experience with actual MMO infrastructure I might be missing something here but I don't see why it would be a problem in fact it makes scaling bigger projects even easier. There are no downsides to this.
So my question remains, why is there no autoscaling? It's perfect for peak load times like an expansion launch after all.