Dual AWS autoscaling policies caused fleet oscillation; single occupancy metric fixed it

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A fleet of stateful EC2 worker instances experienced erratic scaling behavior after two independent autoscaling policies — one tracking average CPU and another monitoring per-instance free slots — began conflicting with each other. Each policy reacted to its own metric without awareness of the other, causing the fleet to scale up and down in a self-defeating loop. The root cause was identified as an emergent distributed-systems problem rather than a bug in either individual policy. The fix was not to tune the timing of either policy, but to replace both with a single Target Tracking policy using CloudWatch Metric Math to compute real-time slot occupancy across the fleet. Consolidating to one scaling authority with one capacity-reflecting metric eliminated the oscillation entirely.

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