Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now gives recommendations about activating predictive scaling policy

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now helps you easily determine whether adding a predictive scaling policy can further optimize the capacity of your Auto Scaling groups. Predictive scaling policies proactively add EC2 instances to your Auto Scaling group in anticipation of demand spikes. This results in better availability and performance for your applications that have predictable demand patterns and long initialization times. It may also help alleviate the need for costly capacity buffers that you otherwise maintain to account for demand spikes. This new recommendation feature provides prescriptive indications about the potential impact of predictive scaling on your application availability and EC2 costs, making it simpler for you to get started with predictive scaling.

Until now, customers had to manually determine the accuracy and the potential impact of predictive scaling for their various Auto Scaling groups. With this new feature, customers can get recommendation on whether predictive scaling does a better job at optimizing their EC2 capacity than their existing scaling configuration, based on up to 8 weeks of past data. A non-mutative Forecast Only mode allows customers to better understand the impact of a predictive scaling policy without having to actually apply it to their Auto Scaling groups. With this information, customers can now make quick and informed decisions about using predictive scaling and the best configurations for it.

For more details on getting started with predictive scaling and supported region list, refer the documentation.