Reserve the Black Friday server in October

The store runs all year on one modest box. For five days in November it needs sixty-four cores, and it needs them to exist before the traffic does.

The marketplace has two shelves. GET /api/v1/servers/available is what's in stock now. GET /api/v1/offers is what can be ordered with a lead time, delivery_hours on each listing. In October you reserve the big one: POST /api/v1/offers/{id}/reserve with days: 7, an idempotency_key so a retry can't buy two, and max_charge_cents so the price can't move under you. The week before, POST /api/v1/containers/{id}/copy moves the store across and the sync endpoint keeps the copy current. On the day, the CNAME moves to the new box's alias. After Cyber Monday, copy back and let the rental lapse.

You didn't autoscale. You bought a week of a bigger computer, in advance, at one flat price for the week.

Peak capacity is a reservation, not a rule.