Alibaba Cloud Auto Scaling service allows you to automatically adjust the number of ECS instances in a scaling group based on your business needs and scaling policies. You can set the minimum and maximum number of instances in a scaling group to limit the range of scaling actions1. When you create a scaling rule, you can specify the number of instances to be added or removed, or the expected number of instances after the scaling action2. You can also create a scheduled task to execute a scaling rule at a specified time or periodically3.

In this question, the customer sets the minimum number of instances to 6 and the maximum number of instances to 8 in the scaling group. This means that the scaling group will always have at least 6 instances and at most 8 instances. The customer also adds a scaling rule to remove 5 instances, and creates a scheduled task based on this rule. However, this scaling rule will not be executed if it violates the minimum and maximum limits of the scaling group. Therefore, when the scheduled task is activated once, the scaling group will only remove 2 instances, which is the difference between the current number of instances (8) and the minimum number of instances (6). The remaining number of instances in the scaling group will be 6, which is the correct answer. References: 1: Create a scaling group - Auto Scaling - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center2: Create a scaling rule - Auto Scaling - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center3: Create a scheduled task - Auto Scaling - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center.