Today we’re excited to announce the launch of Drone Autoscale. Drone Autoscale is a standalone daemon that continuously polls your build queue and provisions or terminates instances based on volume. Our goal is to increase your capacity when you need it, while lowering your monthly server bills.

This is great, right? But how is it different than existing solutions? The biggest difference is integration and intelligence. Drone will never terminate your server mid-build, or worse, mid-deployment. And if it determines your environment is in an inconsistent state, it will repair things. Automatically.

Cloud Providers

Drone Autoscale is architected to integrate with multiple hosting providers. This initial release includes support for DigitalOcean and alpha support for Amazon EC2. Support for Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Hetzner Cloud are in-progress.

Notifications

Drone Autoscale integrates with Slack to notify your team when instances are provisioned and terminated.

Command Line Tools

The command line tools have been updated and include commands for working with the autoscale server. You can now inspect and manage remote instances from the terminal:

$ drone server ls
agent-807jVFwj
agent-IOOsCNd7
agent-hNhs08tj
agent-TiefPo1u

$ drone server info agent-TiefPo1u
Name:    agent-TiefPo1u
Address: 52.3.250.114
Region:  us-east-1e
Size:    t2.medium
State:   running

Sometimes you need to quickly inspect a remote instance. The command line tools help you easily connect to the remote docker daemon:

$ eval $(drone server env agent-TiefPo1u)
$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                   STATUS      
b6aeabe2836f        drone/agent:0.8         2 days ago  

Not quite ready for automated scaling? Not a problem. You can always run the autoscaler in manual mode and provision and terminate instances from the command line.

$ drone server create
Name:    agent-TiefPo1u
Address: 52.3.250.114
Region:  us-east-1e
Size:    t2.medium
State:   pending

$ drone server destroy agent-TiefPo1u
Name:    agent-TiefPo1u
State:   shutdown

Commercial License

Drone Autoscale is distributed under a freemium license. If you are interested in purchasing a commercial license, which includes enterprise support and access to our private Slack channel, please contact our sales team.

Getting Started

Find out more about how to use Drone Autoscale for cost effective and scalable Continuous Delivery with the following resources:

• Repository
• Documentation
• Installation
• Support

We’ll be adding new features and integrations over the coming weeks and months and look forward to hearing your feedback!