What is AWS Auto Scaling?

Auto-scaling facilitates cloud resources to scale up or down automatically, based on the varying needs of an application at any given time. AWS Auto Scaling is a service that automatically monitors and adjusts the compute resources in AWS.

Why use Auto Scaling?

As your business grows, the load on your servers and the number of page requests increases. If ignored, this can result in latency issues or even downtime. With Auto Scaling, your cloud resources will always be available, which helps you avoid failures related to an increased load on limited servers.

AWS Auto Scaling will be helpful over the lifetime of your application setup, regardless of size or how fast your site grows over time.

Scaling plans

Following are the different AWS Auto Scaling plans available:

  • Plans to maintain the desired instance level

  • Plans with manual scaling

  • Plans with scheduled scaling

  • Plans with dynamic scaling: Scaling based on demand

Use cases

  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups: Launch or terminate EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group.

  • Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet requests: Launch or terminate instances from a Spot Fleet request, or automatically replace instances that get interrupted for price or capacity reasons.

  • Amazon ECS: Adjust the ECS service desired count in response to load variations.

Learn how Site24x7 monitors the performance of Auto Scaling groups.