Difficulty scaling Laravel Horizon across multiple instances (ECS / Auto Scaling)

[iagosilva1]

Hello everyone 👋

I’m deploying a Laravel application in a containerized architecture (AWS ECS), where I’ve split services into three separate tasks:

Web (HTTP requests)

Horizon (job processing)

Scheduling (cron tasks)

Each service has its own auto scaling policy, so new instances can be created dynamically as demand increases.

The issue I’m facing is that when trying to scale Horizon horizontally (with multiple containers running simultaneously), there’s almost no documentation or discussion on how Horizon is expected to behave in this scenario.

From what I’ve understood, when I set for example --max-processes=10, it means each instance of Horizon can process up to 10 jobs concurrently. However, there’s no coordination between instances, which causes several problems:

Horizon doesn’t balance jobs evenly across containers;

While a new instance is starting up, existing ones may become overloaded;

Increasing the process count may lead to resource contention (CPU/RAM) on current instances while new ones are not yet active.

In short, there doesn’t seem to be an official strategy for Horizon to operate efficiently across multiple instances with auto scaling.
It appears to assume a static, single-node execution model, which doesn’t adapt well to elastic environments.

❓ Question

Is there any recommended or official approach to make Laravel Horizon work properly in a multi-instance, auto-scaled environment, where each Horizon container runs an independent number of processes without having to define a fixed global limit?

If not, is there any suggested workaround or best practice (for example using Redis coordination, an external Supervisor, or ECS lifecycle hooks) to ensure job distribution and scaling remain predictable and efficient?

💡 Context

Laravel 11

Horizon (latest version)

Redis as queue driver

Deployment: ECS Fargate with auto scaling based on queue metrics

Thanks in advance for any guidance!
I believe this is a fairly common question for those running Horizon in modern, container-based infrastructures with elastic scaling.