Grow or Shrink Amazon EC2 Computing Capacity According to Your Business Needs in Minutes

In today’s dynamic business environment, you need powerful tools that can help you meet your changing organisational needs successfully, such as auto scaling. Auto scaling is a product by Amazon Web Services that enables customers to maintain application availability and scale Amazon EC2’s capacity, both up and down, when needed or as defined.

The auto scaling tool enables you to keep track of the Amazon EC2 instances that you’re running. As the name suggests, the auto scaling tool automatically adjusts Amazon EC2 instances according to the prevailing situation. For example, Amazon EC2 instances increase automatically when the demand spikes. This helps maintain performance. On the other hand, during lulls, EC2 instances decrease in number. This helps lower the cost.

Before we take a closer look at some of the amazing benefits of auto scaling, let us first explain what Amazon EC2 is. Also known as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, it is a powerful and unique web service that offers resizable computing capacity over the cloud. Basically, it has been designed to simplify web scale cloud-computing and make it easy for developers. Amazon EC2 lowers the time that is needed to boot server instances to just minutes, allowing users to scale up and down capacity as and when needed.

Now that you know what Amazon EC2 is and does, let us now go over some of the benefits users can enjoy with the auto scaling feature.

Before Auto-Scaling

traffic level

After Auto-Scaling

traffic level

Maintain the Right Amount of Amazon EC2 Instances

The best part about investing in the auto scaling feature is that it enables users to detect impaired EC2 instances. In other words, you are able to identify and pinpoint unhealthy applications and quickly replace them without bringing your business operations to a standstill.

This allows you to maintain the right amount of Amazon EC2 instances and compute the capacity as needed.

Automatically Scale Amazon EC2

As the name implies, auto scaling features spare you from the stress of changing and maintaining the right number of Amazon EC2 capacity manually. The feature allows you to automatically shrink and grow the capacity as required. However, for this, you will have to configure and set the condition to add and minus EC2 instances. Additionally, you can also benefit from Amazon CloudWatch to quickly send alters for scaling activities and ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) to smoothly distribute traffic to EC2 instances. Auto scaling truly helps users run Amazon EC2 at its optimal level.

How to Get Started?

To maintain healthy EC2 computing capacity, try using auto scaling. Here’s an overview of the process:

First create a proper launch configuration. It helps specify the EC2 instance type that auto scaling will create for you. The launch configuration can be created by inserting information like AMI (Amazon Machine Image) ID, key pairs, block device mapping and security groups.

The next step is to create an auto scaling group. This can be done by going to the auto scaling group details page. Configure scaling policies to create a group and then verify details to get started.

For more information about AWS Autoscaling or service assistance, get in touch with us today!