Scaling & Idle Harbor

Run as many copies of a service as you need, let bootload scale them with load, or drop anchor entirely and pay nothing while it sleeps. Because billing is per-second, scaling down is the same as saving money — a service at zero replicas costs nothing to run.

Manual scaling

Set the number of replicas yourself:

bootload scale <service> --replicas 3

Replicas are horizontal copies of the same image behind one route; traffic is balanced across the healthy ones.

Drop anchor (scale to zero)

bootload scale <service> --replicas 0

This stops every replica — no compute billing while it's anchored. Storage (volumes, images) is still kept and still metered; only the running cost stops. Scale it back up with --replicas 1 when you need it.

Horizontal autoscaling

Let bootload add and remove replicas to hold a target CPU level:

bootload scale <service> --min 1 --max 5 --target-cpu 70

bootload keeps replicas between min and max, adding capacity when average CPU rises above the target and removing it when load falls. --target-cpu is what switches autoscaling on; --replicas switches it back to manual.

Vertical memory autoscaling

For a workload whose memory needs grow, cap the out-of-memory ladder instead of guessing a fixed size:

bootload scale <service> --autoscale-memory max=2048

bootload steps the replica's memory up the ladder as it approaches its limit, up to the cap you set (in MB). max=0 turns it off.

Idle Harbor — sleep when idle, wake on demand ⚓

For request-driven services that sit quiet between bursts, Idle Harbor scales them to zero when idle and wakes them on the next request — so you pay for compute only while traffic is actually arriving.

bootload idle-harbor <service> on
bootload idle-harbor <service> on --idle-after 300
bootload idle-harbor <service> off

After a period with no traffic (default 900 seconds, or whatever you set with --idle-after), the service sleeps. The next incoming request wakes it — the first request after a sleep waits for the cold start, then it's warm again.

While sleeping, bootload keeps a snapshot so the wake is fast; that snapshot is billed as storage at €0.05 per GB-month — far less than running idle compute. Idle Harbor suits HTTP apps, internal tools, and bursty workloads; a service that must never miss a beat should stay at a fixed replica count instead.