Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

EC2 Auto Scaling is a foundational component of high availability architectures in AWS. It allows one to dynamically scale in response to key metrics - such as CPU utilization on the web nodes - or schedule scaling based on anticipated events - such as a flash sale for an e-commerce site. By scaling horizontally, one saves money by not having to scale up to peak traffic. By maintaining manageable traffic loads on each of the nodes in the autoscaling group, one minimizes the incidence of nodes in the autoscaling group failing, which translates to higher availability of the application served by the instances. This is not to mention the possibility of hardware failure on the AWS side, a low likelihood but totally possible event. High availability is not purely a frontend or backend concern. Anything you can do with EC2s that benefits from high availability benefits from autoscaling.

If you need to establish a system right away, in the past it took weeks or months to request a quote from the vendor and receive the equipment. Now, with Amazon EC2 in less than tens of minutes or hours, you can create a test environment and test it without any inconvenience.

It is well suited for hosting files, websites, and applications on the internet rather than using multiple third parties.

Well suited when you really meet their requirement to handle increase/decrease resources based on demand. Without it, the process should be done manually and can be error-prone due to human intervention on repetitive tasks. Automation is the key word here. The problem would be the complexity or technicality it might add but with clear dev-ops team or documentation or a manual of how to use it might be fine.

Usability is good since we already know how AWS works. For those that are new it might be a little bit confusing at the beginning but they are improving it at a fast pace. Even though AWS keeps changing the user interface constantly, it is still powerful, understandable and easy to use. For technical people, they still offer the CLI.

For basic and non-complex set ups there [are] a lot of tutorials and information out there on the internet. You can solve pretty much any problem you are dealing with. AWS also provides different support plans. In our case, since we have a dev-ops team we do not need any support plan yet, but we can reconsider it in the future since we are growing.

Despite the problems with the lack of information (and help) on the new user interface, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a terrific tool that show[s] us easily the power of "the cloud". Only a few years ago, increasing server capacity involved weeks or months of planning, and a hefty budget in some cases. Now, with the Auto Scaling capacity, you can increase and decrease capacity with a rule, and without a long commitment and investment on hardware.

The new interface is an improvement on several ways over the old one, but, as usual from Amazon, they changed some behaviors - so if you are already a user, probably you need to learn how to do some tasks that you used to in the new way. No explanation on why [they] changed the interface and how it's better, etc. You just you need to learn how to do it on the new interface.

Despite that annoying habit from Amazon of changing everything, the new interface is clear and works. But beware that in the future that would change again, with no explanation whatsoever.

The platform works as is. The help and tutorials on the help page can help you to setup the entire platform without problems, and also provides help on a huge variety of problems.

Amazon also provides support plans. We have the basic support plan, but Amazon offers three support tiers, and we know that it works perfect.