Auto sacalling

Auto Scaling

AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, are housed in highly-available data centers. To provide additional scalability and reliability, these data centers are in different physical locations. Regions are large and widely dispersed geographic locations. Each region contains multiple distinct locations, called Availability Zones, that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region. Auto Scaling enables you to take advantage of the safety and reliability of geographic redundancy by spanning Auto Scaling groups across multiple Availability Zones within a region. When one Availability Zone becomes unhealthy or unavailable, Auto Scaling launches new instances in an unaffected Availability Zone. When the unhealthy Availability Zone returns to a healthy state, Auto Scaling automatically redistributes the application instances evenly across all of the designated Availability Zones.

You can add new instances to the application only when necessary, and terminate them when they're no longer needed. And because Auto Scaling uses EC2 instances, you only have to pay for the instances you use, when you use them. You now have a cost-effective architecture that provides the best customer experience while minimizing expenses.

An Auto Scaling group can contain EC2 instances in one or more Availability Zones within the same region. However, Auto Scaling groups cannot span multiple regions.

Web App Architecture

In a common web app scenario, you run multiple copies of your app simultaneously to cover the volume of your customer traffic. These multiple copies of your application are hosted on identical EC2 instances (cloud servers), each handling customer requests.

You can create as many Auto Scaling groups as you need. For example, you can create an Auto Scaling group for each tier.Auto Scaling manages the launch and termination of these EC2 instances on your behalf. You define a set of criteria (such as an Amazon CloudWatch alarm) that determines when the Auto Scaling group launches or terminates EC2 instances. Adding Auto Scaling groups to your network architecture can help you make your application more highly available and fault tolerant.

To distribute traffic between the instances in your Auto Scaling groups, you can introduce a load balancer into your architecture.

Instance Distribution

Auto Scaling attempts to distribute instances evenly between the Availability Zones that are enabled for your Auto Scaling group. Auto Scaling does this by attempting to launch new instances in the Availability Zone with the fewest instances. If the attempt fails, however, Auto Scaling attempts to launch the instances in another Availability Zone until it succeeds. For each instance that Auto Scaling launches in a VPC, it selects a subnet from the Availability Zone at random.

Benefits of Auto Scaling

Adding Auto Scaling to your application architecture is one way to maximize the benefits of the AWS cloud. When you use Auto Scaling, your applications gain the following benefits:

• Better fault tolerance.- Auto Scaling can detect when an instance is unhealthy, terminate it, and launch an instance to replace it.
• Better availability. You can configure Auto Scaling to use multiple Availability Zones. If one Availability Zone becomes unavailable, Auto Scaling can launch instances in another one to compensate.
• Better cost management. Auto Scaling can dynamically increase and decrease capacity as needed. Because you pay for the EC2 instances you use, you save money by launching instances when they are actually needed and terminating them when they aren't needed.