Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Reviews

First, let's clarify what an EC2 instance is. It's essentially a virtual server provisioned by Amazon. You can configure it to host various applications. 

For example, if you want to auto-deploy applications, you can configure NGINX or Apache. For Java applications, you'd install a web server like Tomcat and the JVM to run your code.

The most valuable feature is how it scales instances up and down. You specify the desired server sizes, and AWS provisions the CPU and memory accordingly. There's a cost associated with that.

Applications deployed on EC2 instances can easily integrate with other AWS services. For example, you can connect your EC2 Auto Scaling group to a tool like CloudWatch for health checks and anomaly detection.

In my company, we use Auto Scaling for EC2 instances. I use Auto Scaling with a load balancer when there is very high internet traffic and we need to serve more users. The load balancer will just scale up to serve more users.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that EC2 instances spin up fast but not fast enough, allowing users to choose the version that they want almost instantaneously. I think you can provision EC2 instances while handling everything via writing a piece of code that is very useful.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is used to divide the heavy traffic of our solutions and process the request properly.

In a multi-tenancy architecture, when we have requests from multiple tenants, the CPU utilization of our machines goes high, and the processing time increases. However, when we use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, it processes faster.

We use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling for SAP workloads to the cloud.

We have found that the sizing in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is far off. For example, we will see some at one terabyte and the other one is two terabytes. There is nothing between one and two terabytes. Sometimes it's a struggle if I need one and a half, I still am supposed to pay for two. There are five terabytes, six terabytes, and 12 terabytes, and if I need something at eight or nine, I'm still paying 30 to 40 percent more by taking the one which is 12 terabytes. Microsoft Azure does similar sizes but the gap can be more, such as six terabytes, and the next one is 12 terabytes.

Creating a target group is essential when setting up Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. You can specify the target capacity, indicating the desired number of instances within the same instance family. Additionally, you define CPU thresholds to trigger scaling actions, specifying when to increase or decrease instances. Moreover, you configure the load balancer to communicate with the front end.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling operates at a different level, working in parallel to efficiently manage workload distribution. Primarily, it focuses on orchestration rather than directly managing EC2 instances for deployment and configuration. It uses automated processes to deploy and manage ports, leveraging Application Load Balancers to effectively handle data communication and management.

The tool is a simple solution. You can deploy a new virtual machine in minutes. You can select options like memory and core number and connect storage. It's great because it's simple and fast. You can build a virtual machine in minutes, do your experiments, and then uninstall it without paying for it when it's not in use.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is simple to integrate. 

The solution is not cheap. 

We have several instances and applications that we run using WordPress. For that, I needed an easy, secure, and faster solution with different options to back up the website and data. Amazon EC2 offers options to back up data using the S3 version control system, which worked really well for us. Moreover, it's cost-effective.

Having a load balancer in between is very helpful when you have huge traffic. It has been beneficial for handling around 80,000 to 200,000 visitors a month on our blog.

There is room for improvement in the scalability.