AWS Debuts New Auto Scaling Service for Cloud Applications
By definition, the cloud is supposed to enable elastic services that can scale up and down as needed. When it comes to application delivery though, scaling up and down hasn't always been as easy as it should be.
On Jan. 17, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its new Auto Scaling service that aims to make it easier to use the cloud the way it was intended, on a consumption basis. Since its inception, AWS has had elastic services. EC2, after all, is literally an acronym for the Elastic Compute Cloud. The new AWS Auto Scaling feature, however, is intended to serve a different use case than the existing Elastic Load Balancing and EC2 Auto Scaling services.
“We are making it easier for you to use the Auto Scaling features of multiple AWS services from a single user interface with the introduction of AWS Auto Scaling,” Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS, wrote in a blog post. “This new service unifies and builds on our existing, service-specific, scaling features.”
So instead of AWS cloud users needing to set up specific sets of scaling actions and alarms for different AWS services, users now just point AWS Auto Scaling at an application. The AWS Auto Scaling service can automatically build and maintain a scaling plan based on different strategies.
Users can choose to optimize application auto-scaling based on availability. With that option, AWS Auto Scaling will have a resource utilization target and ensure capacity to absorb demand spikes. Another strategy is to optimize for cost, where there is a higher resource utilization threshold. There is also an option to balance between availability and cost, where AWS Auto Scaling uses a moderate resource utilization target to provide high available with moderate costs.
“We are launching AWS Auto Scaling today in the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions today, with more to follow,” Barr wrote. “There’s no charge for AWS Auto Scaling; you pay only for the CloudWatch Alarms that it creates and any AWS resources that you consume.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
