Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows customers to easily scale their resources up or down as needed, to handle changes in demand. There are several types to achieve this:
Automatic Scaling
This feature automatically increases or decreases the number of instances in an Auto Scaling group based on CloudWatch alarms. This is useful for applications with predictable traffic patterns, such as a website that experiences increased traffic during certain times of the day.
Manual Scaling
With this method, the customer manually increases or decreases the number of instances in an Auto Scaling group. This option is suitable for customers who want more control over when and how their instances are scaled.
Scheduled Scaling
This feature allows customers to scale the number of instances in an Auto Scaling group based on a schedule. This can be useful for applications that experience predictable traffic patterns, such as a website that experiences increased traffic during certain times of the day.
Dynamic Scaling
This feature allows customers to automatically scale their instances based on system performance metrics, such as CPU usage, memory usage, and network traffic. This can be useful for applications that experience unpredictable or variable traffic patterns.
It’s worth noting that, when scaling instances, it’s important to consider the effect of scaling on the network and storage resources. For example, when scaling up, the customer should make sure that their load balancer can handle the increased traffic.
AWS also provides additional services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and AWS Lambda that automatically scales your application based on incoming requests or schedules. With these services, customers don’t have to worry about scaling their instances and can focus on developing and running their applications.
Overall, the ability to scale resources in EC2 allows customers to easily handle changes in demand, and ensure that their applications have the resources they need to perform well, while also helping to reduce costs by only paying for the resources they actually use.