News

AWS Unifies Auto Scaling Across Multiple Services

• By David Ramel
• 01/22/2018

Auto scaling, a fundamental tenet of the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud computing platform that lets users consume resources on-demand and pay only for what they use, has been unified in order to let users manage it across multiple services.

AWS users can now manage the new AWS Auto Scaling service from one UI tool. Previously, AWS had implemented auto scaling piecemeal across a range of different services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), ECS (container service), Spot Fleets, DynamoDB, Aurora, AppStream 2.0 and EMR (elastic MapReduce). Auto scaling was initially done via tools such as Elastic Load Balancing, EC2 Auto Scaling and Amazon CloudWatch.

Now, AWS is seeking to simplify and streamline the process of implementing and managing auto scaling.

"This new service unifies and builds on our existing, service-specific, scaling features," AWS said in a blog post on Jan. 16. "It operates on any desired EC2 Auto Scaling groups, EC2 Spot Fleets, ECS tasks, DynamoDB tables, DynamoDB Global Secondary Indexes, and Aurora Replicas that are part of your application, as described by an AWS CloudFormation stack or in AWS Elastic Beanstalk (we’re also exploring some other ways to flag a set of resources as an application for use with AWS Auto Scaling).

"You no longer need to set up alarms and scaling actions for each resource and each service. Instead, you simply point AWS Auto Scaling at your application and select the services and resources of interest. Then you select the desired scaling option for each one, and AWS Auto Scaling will do the rest, helping you to discover the scalable resources and then creating a scaling plan that addresses the resources of interest."

Scaling options let customers optimize for different factors, such as availability or cost or a balance between the two.

AWS Auto Scaling is initially available in three U.S.-based regions, one in Ireland and one in Singapore, with more regional support planned. It entails no extra fee, AWS said, as customers need only pay for any CloudWatch Alarms it creates and any AWS resources that are consumed.