Amazon wants you to scale. After all, they get paid more as your cloud grows. That’s where Auto Scaling comes in.
“Auto Scaling is an AWS service that allows you to increase or decrease the number of EC2 instances within your application’s architecture. With Auto Scaling, you create collections of EC2 instances, called Auto Scaling groups. You can specify the minimum and maximum number of instances in each Auto Scaling group. Each Auto Scaling group can contain one or more scaling policies—these policies define when Auto Scaling launches or terminates EC2 instances within the group,” Amazon explained.
Graphic Source: Amazon
Auto Scaling isn’t just a blunt instrument. Instead customers can create groups, each of which can scale in the form of EC2 instances. This preserves availability for whatever apps and services you choose.
“We’ve made it easy for you to enable Auto Scaling on a running instance directly from the Instances view in the AWS Management Console. To learn how to enable Auto Scaling on running instances, please visit Attach EC2 Instances to Your Auto Scaling Group,” Amazon said.
Amazon also has some ways to help IT learn about Auto Scaling, the sites How Auto Scaling Works, Auto Scaling Group Lifecycle , Getting Started with Auto Scaling, and Planning Your Auto Scaling Group.
Auto Scaling is an efficient way to deal with the ebbs and flows of capacity demand, be it spikes or days with heavy traffic. “You can add new instances to the application only when necessary, and terminate them when they’re no longer needed. And because Auto Scaling uses EC2 instances, you only have to pay for the instances you use, when you use them. You now have a cost-effective architecture that provides the best customer experience while minimizing expenses,” Amazon said.
Graphic Source: Amazon
