I work in the entertainment &#x2F; ticketing industry and we&#x27;ve been burned badly before by relying on AWS&#x27; Elastic Load Balancer due to sudden &amp; unexpected traffic spikes.<p>From the article: &quot;Elastic Load Balancer (ELB): [...] It scales without your doing anything. If it sees additional traffic it scales behind the scenes both horizontally and vertically. You don’t have to manage it. As your applications scales so is the ELB.&quot;<p>From Amazon&#x27;s ELB documentation: &quot;Pre-Warming the Load Balancer: [...] In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic is expected [...] we recommend that you contact us to have your load balancer &quot;pre-warmed&quot;. We will then configure the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on the traffic that you expect. We will need to know the start and end dates of your tests or expected flash traffic, the expected request rate per second and the total size of the typical request&#x2F;response that you will be testing.&quot;