Effective DevOps with AWS - Second Edition

Pre-warming a load balancer

A well-known problem in the CLB is that it is necessary to pre-warm in order to manage traffic peak because the system is made to scale up, as you can read in the documentation. We recommend that you increase the load at a rate of no more than 50 percent every five minutes.

The official declaration about this topic is available at https://aws.amazon.com/articles/best-practices-in-evaluating-elastic-load-balancing/#pre-warming. This states the following:

 "Amazon ELB is able to handle the vast majority of use cases for our customers without requiring "pre-warming" (configuring the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on expected traffic). In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic ...