AWS has had auto-scaling for a while as part of a handful of specific services. Amazon’s now announced the feature is expanding to many more products. The company’s also launching a new unified interface where developers can control auto-scaling behaviour across all their AWS apps and products.
Auto-scaling addresses the issue of balancing server resources against their cost. Developers have to pay more to access an AWS instance with additional resources.
For a lot of applications, this static pricing isn’t ideal. An app which spikes in popularity at peak times but sits idle the remainder of the day would run up unnecessary costs for most of its operation. This reduces the developer’s revenue and also lowers the efficiency of the entire AWS infrastructure, since resources are unnecessarily assigned to the app.
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With auto-scaling, developers can allow their apps to automatically add resources as required. As the demand for a service grows, AWS will assign more resources to the app and maintain the expected level of performance. Auto-scaling improves the efficiency of cloud services and allows app instances to respond in real-time to changes in demand.
“You simply point AWS Auto Scaling at your application and select the services and resources of interest,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr explained in a blog post. “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.”
Amazon now gives developers a single set of auto-scaling options to enable and configure the feature across all their AWS components. Auto-scaling can be set to optimise for consistent performance, lower costs or a balance between the two. Developers can also define their own custom scaling strategies for complex workloads.
With entire enterprises now transitioning away from on-premises tech, agile features like auto-scaling help to make cloud services more attractive. Businesses can improve performance while cutting their costs by allowing their infrastructure to manage resources for them. Auto-scaling can be enabled for free, with developers only paying for the additional scaled resources as they use them.
