---
title: "Should AWS ECS services scale on queue depth or CPU usage?"  
description: "Should AWS ECS services scale on queue depth or CPU usage?"  
author: "Nimmy Patel"  
published: 2026-10-11  
updated: 2026-10-11  
canonical: https://www.mindstick.com/forum/162261/should-aws-ecs-services-scale-on-queue-depth-or-cpu-usage  
category: "Amazon ECS"  
tags: ["AWS ECS", "Amazon SQS", "Autoscaling"]  
reading_time: 1 minute  

---

# Should AWS ECS services scale on queue depth or CPU usage?

For an ECS service that processes messages from a queue, CPU usage doesn’t always tell us whether we’re keeping up. The tasks can be mostly idle while the backlog grows, or briefly use a lot of CPU while the queue is still draining normally.

What metric has worked best for scaling this kind of service: **queue depth**, age of the oldest message, CPU, or a combination? I’m also curious how people avoid scaling up and down too aggressively when traffic arrives in bursts.


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Original Source: https://www.mindstick.com/forum/162261/should-aws-ecs-services-scale-on-queue-depth-or-cpu-usage

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