I have an AWS ECS cluster whose only purpose is to run a scheduled task every 12 hours. Currently, I leave the cluster scaled to 1 instance so the task has somewhere to run. I would instead like to leave the cluster at 0 instances and configure it to auto-scale up to 1 instance when the scheduled task runs, then back down to 0 when the task finishes.
My research indicates that ECS auto-scaling is typically used to scale instances according to metrics such as resource utilization, so what I want may not be possible. The closest solution I've found is to create a scheduled action for the auto-scaling group, as described here; I could schedule the cluster to scale up every 12 hours, just before the scheduled task runs, though I'm not sure how I would ensure that the cluster only scales back down after the task finishes. (This is essentially the solution suggested by this answer, but it's over two years old and I'm hoping the situation has changed to allow what I want.)
So ideally, the cluster should scale in response to the scheduled task itself. Is this possible?