You can proactively scale your applications in response to known traffic patterns or special events. For example, if you have cyclical patterns (daily, weekly, or monthly) in the usage of your application, then you can leverage that information to scale up or down the number of instances at the appropriate time to handle the increase or decrease in demand, respectively. You can also rapidly scale up just minutes in advance of special events, such as flash sales or in response to some major breaking news, to handle a huge surge in traffic.