What is Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and how does it work?

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IT teams strive to reduce downtime for applications and workloads while working in the cloud. This is done to ensure that customers, stakeholders, employees, and other stakeholders have access to critical resources 24×7. Cloud computing allows organizations to spread their workloads across available zones, increasing fault tolerance and increasing availability. If planned correctly, organizations can better utilize cloud resources, reduce cost, improve performance of workloads/apps and provide a better experience for customers/users via the cloud.
AWS, the largest cloud service provider, offers Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. This allows organizations to scale up or down their instances based on workloads’ performance and needs.
This article focuses on Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, and how it can benefit your business. Learn more about the AWS training and learning resources available to developers, solutions architects, and other cloud professionals online. This will help you to learn and implement Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
Our AWS EC2 guide will help you get started with cloud computing.
What is Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and how does it work?
Amazon EC2 auto scaling is an AWS feature that optimizes the number EC2 instances available to your workloads and apps by scaling up or down based on workloads’ performance. Your team creates Auto Scaling Groups that contain EC2 instances. You can specify a minimum size, desired capacity, as well as a maximum size that will indicate the number of instances in the Auto Scaling Group. Your team can specify the conditions under which auto-scaling should occur. Dynamic scaling is a type of scaling.
You can also set a schedule for when scaling up or down of instances should occur. This type of scaling is also known as scheduled scaling. Predictive scaling uses machine learning to scale instances up or down based upon traffic predictions. The ML algorithms identify patterns in daily and weekly traffic to automate scaling.
AWS Auto Scaling: Benefits
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers three main benefits:
Fault tolerance: This is the ability of an infrastructure to balance the load and ensure that the application is always up and running. You can automatically launch new instances and terminate existing instances using the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling feature. Developers and solution architects can launch instances in different availability zones to reduce downtime. Auto Scaling makes the application and workloads more fault-tolerant.
Availability: The team can distribute the workloads or applications across Availability Zones. Instances are optimized based upon traffic so that the apps are always up and running.
Cost management: Autoscaling allows you to add or remove instances based on traffic and workload. Scaling up and down instances can optimize resources and improve cost management. AWS charges only for what you use.
Relationship between Amazon EC2 Elastic Load Balancencing and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Cloud load balancing allows cloud professionals to distribute workloads across multiple cloud instances to improve performance and efficiency. Elastic Load Balancing distributes application traffic automatically across EC2 instances. It ensures that the EC2 instances do not become overloaded. Elastic load balance can be used in conjunction with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. This allows for the right number of instances to run based on traffic and workloads.
The Auto Scaling group can also be used to attach elastic load balancers. All instances of the group launching are registered with the load balancing. Once the load balancer has been attached, the Auto Scaling group should be configured to read the Elastic Load Balance metrics to scale the resources according to traffic and workloads.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: Learning resources
AWS provides an online guide to help developers and architects learn how to use EC2’s Auto Scaling features. Learn about the lifecycle of an instance, how to launch templates, configure, monitor groups, and other aspects of Auto Scaling.
NetCom Learning’s course Architecting on AWS is for solutions architects who want to learn more about cloud architecture principles and best practices. They can also explore the various AWS services that help create scalable, reliable and highly available architecture.
The three-day Architecting with AWS course provides professionals with exposure to Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Block Storage and Amazon S3, Amazon Machine Images and Amazon RDS.