title: What's the correct Cloudwatch/Autoscale settings for extremely short traffic spikes on Amazon Web Services?
body: <p>I have a site running on amazon elastic beanstalk with the following traffic pattern:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>~50 concurrent users normally.</li>
  <li>~2000 concurrent users for 1/2 minutes when post is made to Facebook page.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Amazon web services claim to be able to rapidly scale to challenges like this but the "Greater than x for more than 1 minute" setup of cloudwatch doesn't appear to be fast enough for this traffic pattern?</p>
  
  <p>Usually within seconds all the ec2 instances crash, killing all cloudwatch metrics and the whole site is down for 4/6 minutes. So far I've yet to find a configuration that works for this senario.</p>
  
  <p>Here is the graph of a smaller event that also killed the site:
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/eU9K8.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>