This past May Cassatt announced availability of demand-based policies, which monitor the changing demand on servers and automatically turn them off when they become idle.

The technical publications team is pleased to follow up with the details: what exactly do these policies do, and how do you configure them.

Briefly: demand-based policies allow you to measure load on your servers using a protocol that is relevant for your application. Cassatt Active Response compares the measurements with your preset optimal service levels, then adds or removes servers to optimize for your goals. In the software and the docs, we call these demand-based policies "load-based SLAs."

Node-based SLAs continue to work as usual for those who prefer to specify capacity in number of nodes, but we've added the ability to deactivate an application tier when servers are idle for a specified period of time. The new "idle timer" (also available with load-based SLAs) lets you save on power over nights and weekends when servers aren't being used.

To read about improvements to node-based SLAs, and our new load-based SLAs, see the article Tier Configuration and Personalization, and look for the section entitled "SLA."