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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.

Software and tools for your start-up

Our customers are often looking for recommendations for software products and tools.

We would suggest SaaS (software as a service) products as they give a lean, quick to use model that can often start on a free tier and scale up or down as your business needs.

Here are some suggestion for good software tools:

• GSuite: For email, documents and spreadsheets. It's cost effective and just works.

• Google Analytics: It's free to use so as a default we add it to any website we work on unless we're asked not to.

• Intercom: A feature rich product with live chat, a bot, product walkthrough's and marketing automation. We love the free tier which provides our startups with a great overview of who their users are and what they're doing on the platform.

• Trello: Trello is great project management tool that has an excellent free tier. The best thing about it is that it is super simple and easy to use. Trello provides a user experience that requires no learning curve and our clients can use it immediately to track the development of their project. It's also a great tool for planning product roadmaps!

• Jira: for internal projects. The latest version of Jira is simple to use and is perfect for agile project development.

• Bitbucket: Store and manage code. If you're a first time founder and non-technical, know that your developers will most likely use Github or Bitbucket for their Git repository. Hint: If you are a solo founder and are outsourcing your application development be sure to own the repository so that you hold the keys to the kingdom.

• AWS (Amazon Web Services): The biggest and most cost effective with deepest product set. They offer excellent packages for start-ups.

• Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp: Both of these platforms are great for sending email marketing campaigns.

• Twilio: For sending SMS triggered from actions made within an application. For example to alert users to certain actions (when SMS is preferred over email) or for verifying a mobile number. Twilio offers many services but we've mainly used their API for SMS.

• Balsamiq: There are hundreds of wireframing tools on the market. Balsamiq was one of the originals. It's a no frills 'low-fi' approach to wireframes which we believe is the best approach.

• Xero: One of the best accounting software solutions that will scale with your business.

• Slack: The perfect tool for rapid internal communication between small teams.

• Google Hangouts / Meet: Google Meet for calls, video calls and screen sharing. It's free to use and on a good internet connection is very stable. A great alternative that we find our larger clients using is Zoom. If you're already using GSuite and want a decent free product try Google Meet.

• Loom: For screen recordings. It comes in very handy for bug reporting and for creating training videos when you need to record your screen. The free tier is excellent!

• Miro: A collaborative white board tool for creating mind maps, user flows, website information architecture, product roadmaps and more.

There are plenty of products you can use and it is easy to have too many tools. It is always best to map out why you want to a tool and what you want it to solve first, then find the best tool for you. If you are looking for software that supports you cloud journey we are happy to make suggestions on some solutions that we recommend.