One of the principal reasons for moving to the cloud has been the convenience of scaling up or down based on client requirements. With AWS Auto Scaling’s help, every organization can manage application performance in a single unified interface and sustain it at the lowest feasible price. On the contrary, manual scaling is not only time-consuming but expensive as well.
This blog is a guide to help you understand AWS Auto Scaling, how it works, its merits and demerits, and more.
What Is AWS Auto Scaling?
AWS Auto Scaling is a solution that helps the user to monitor and configure scaling for selected AWS (Amazon Web Services) services within the applications in a few minutes. With Auto Scaling, you can always be sure of adequate instances/resources to handle your workload irrespective of how the traffic moves.
You can control the scaling of resources and configure AWS Auto Scaling through scaling plans. Thus ensuring that you manage the computing power needed to handle the application load and remove it when no longer needed.
AWS Services Where AWS Auto Scaling Is Used
Presently, you can use AWS Auto Scaling to scale the following services from AWS. Amazon AutoScaling is directed at the horizontal scaling of these services.
Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet: Start or end instances from a Spot Fleet request.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling groups: Start or end EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS): Modify the ECS tasks in response to load variations.
Amazon DynamoDB: Allow a global secondary index or a DynamoDB table to adjust its provisioned volume.
Amazon Aurora: Dynamically modify the number of read replicas.
How Does AWS Auto Scaling Work?
AWS Auto Scaling scrutinizes your cloud environment and automatically discovers the resources that are scalable rather than having to identify them manually one by one.
You can find scalable resources by EC2 Auto Scaling groups, tag, or CloudFormation stack.
Main
Constituents of AWS Auto Scaling
The two main constituents of AWS Auto Scaling are scaling strategy and scaling plan.
Scaling Plan
It is the main component of AWS Auto Scaling and can be created in AWS Console. It is a series of directions for scaling your resources. Working with AWS CloudFormation or adding tags to scalable resources can help you with setting plans for different resources.
Scaling Strategy
It is a part of the scaling plan and includes everything that AWS Auto Scaling needs to know to scale the application resources appropriately. Organizations can scale for both availability and cost in a balanced manner or individually for availability or cost.
You can also develop your custom strategy based on your defined metrics and thresholds. You can define different strategies for each resource type or resource.
Merits of AWS Auto Scaling
Following are the merits of AWS Auto Scaling:
High availability of resources
Better cost management
Better fault tolerance
High reliability of resources
High flexibility of resources
Different Types of Scaling Plans
A scaling plan helps users enable a set of instructions for scaling AWS services based on the software requirements.
Manual scaling: In this scaling, creating or ending EC2 instances is done on its own.
Scaling based on a schedule: Here developers forecast future traffic and schedule time for Auto Scaling.
Scaling based on demand: In this format, the developers execute required scaling in response to client demand.
Maintaining the current instance level: In this scaling, developers create an Auto Scaling group for managing the running instances.
Moving forward, let us learn how to create an AWS Auto Scaling group.
AWS Auto Scaling Group
To start with, create an Auto Scaling group option using a launch configuration.
Next, input an appropriate name for the Auto Scaling group and leave the rest of the settings as default.
Now, select at least two default subnets and click next to configure the scaling method.
Choose Use scaling policies to assign the group’s capacity and set the desired number in the target value.
Now click on next: configure notifications.
Follow the steps by going to the last option of creating an Auto Scaling group in the same section. Ensure you review all the configurations that you have set.
You have now created an AWS Auto Scaling group successfully.
Summary
AWS Auto Scaling is a vast topic, and there are multiple AWS services that can be auto-scaled in the cloud environment. If you prefer to have your AWS infrastructure managed by Chargewave contact us to learn more about our monthly packages.