Question

Need more specifics on apps (scaling, etc.)

I found deploying an app is very easy and I like the process, but there’s very little information on how they work.

  1. Can I automatically scale up to a certain number of containers?
  2. Does adding more containers automatically load-balance across them?
  3. My app logs to its own directory… is there any way to access it or do I need to create a web-based way to access them?

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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July 26, 2023
Accepted Answer

Hi there 👋,

Happy to hear that you’ve liked the App Platform so far!

To answer your questions:

  • There is no automatical scaling up, you can either use the DigitalOcean Control Panel to change the number of containers, or you can use either the DigitalOcean API or the doctl CLI tool to do this programmatically:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/scale-app/

  • The traffic will be automatically load-balanced across the containers, so you will not have to do any changes on your end. Except if your app uses sessions, then in this case it would be best to use a service like Redis to store your sessions there so that they could be shared across all containers.

  • As the storage of the containers in the App Platform is ephemeral, meaning that no data is persisted across restarts, I would suggest using an S3 storage to store your logs like the DigitalOcean Spaces. Or if you don’t need to persist your logs, as you mentioned you could create a web-based way of accessing them while they are still available inside the containers.

UPDATE: The App Platform now supports CPU based autoscaling:

https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-cpu-based-autoscaling-app-platform

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby

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