Amazon Introduces AWS Auto Scaling

When operating a large website or SaaS platform that’s hosted in the cloud, there will often be periods of time that require the underlying resources to be scaled up in order to handle periodic spikes in usage. While most cloud hosting providers make it easy to scale up when needed, doing so often required managing resources individually. This would require more work of admins.

 

 

However, with AWS Auto Scaling, a new service that Amazon recently announced in a post on the AWS blog, managing resources and ensuring that there are no outages has just become a bit easier. This new service enables users to monitor and manage multiple AWS resources and services simultaneously, all from one unified dashboard.

With AWS Auto Scaling, users can simply select a set of resources or AWS services, choose a scaling option, and then Auto Scaling will create a scaling plan for those resources that are able to scale. This is something that can save quite a bit of time when compared to manually configuring the same scaling options for each resource or service individually.

What’s great about Auto Scaling in AWS is that users can choose from several different scaling options based on factors such as desired cost and availability. For example, users could optimize for cost, which would keep prices low. With a lower scaling threshold, it could also potentially lead to performance issues in the event of a usage spike. Alternatively, users could decide to configure their resources to scale up as much as needed to maintain efficient performance or could choose an option somewhere in between.

Regardless of which scaling configuration or thresholds a user decides on, a policy will be automatically generated for the user by the AWS Auto Scaling service. And when the extra resources are no longer required, they will automatically be scaled back down, helping users to avoid paying for resources that are no longer required.

For those who manage websites or applications where uptime and performance are critical, Amazon’s new AWS Auto Scaling could prove quite useful, especially if there are multiple resources to monitor. And while AWS does offer the option to set alarms and scaling options for individual services, the ability to simply configure scaling options for multiple services at the same time is something that can save quite a bit of time. This also helps in reducing the possibility of errors and potential resource utilization issues that could result from manually managing resource scaling options.