In our organization, we use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to automatically adjust compute capacity based on workload demand for our product, scaling out during peak usage and scaling in during off-hours to save costs is the main purpose. Our use case primarily covers backend application servers, data processing workloads, and batch jobs that have fluctuating demand. It also integrates seamlessly with our Elastic Load Balancer.
Pros
Intelligently adds or removes instances based on traffic or workload metrics.
Eg: During business hours, our customer portal experiences high traffic.
Cons
Complex Initial Setup and Configuration
CloudWatch alarms require several interconnected steps. A more guided, visual setup workflow or better default templates could make onboarding easier.
Likelihood to Recommend
we are using it for web applications. Our customer-facing portal gets heavy traffic during business hours but drops significantly at night. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling adds instances in the morning and removes them in the evening automatically, keeping performance high while reducing costs.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Engineering (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)
We are using AWS EC2 for most of our server requirements. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling service improves the use of AWS EC2. It automatically replaces the instances with bad health conditions, it allows to sleep a server when there are low loads, etc. The main function of AWS EC2 Auto Scaling is that it saves us from any unpredictable server breakdowns by scaling the servers according to the requirements.
Pros
It doesn't require any monitoring or manual changes.
It automatically scale up the infrastructure whenever required.
It put the extra instances on sleep in case of the reduced load to save money and electricity.
It replaces the instances automatically in case of bad health conditions.
Cons
Support of AWS is good but they take so much time to respond.
You require an experienced technical team to setup AWS EC2 Auto Scaling.
Likelihood to Recommend
AWS EC2 Auto Scaling is well suited for you if you are using AWS EC2 instances for your deployment requirements and you want to build an auto-scaling solution. If you do not want to break down your deployment in between, you should set up the auto-scaling along with the load balancers.
We hosted an e-commerce website for a client on ec2 instance and plan to provide high availability prevent downtime as it is a must requirement for every site. So we use Ec2 autoscaling which is very helpful for us to divide the load between servers, scale our site, and makes the resources to sleep when there is no need of it and makes it able to run and consume when facing high load which helps in better performance as well as for billing. EC2 Autoscaling monitors the site metrics like its load hits and usage etc. and helps us to improve site performance. It is also pocket friendly, as it helps to save resources and cost very efficiently
Pros
Divide Load of the site on multi-server
It help is improving bill with high performance
It helps for high availability and site speed
It enable to sleep the resources which are not in use
Cons
It should be a more User friendly UI to set up
Likelihood to Recommend
We were concerned about improving our billing by the method which helps us save charges for the resources. We were concerned to improve our billing by the method which helps us save charges for the resources that are not in use. Because it is a waste of resources as well as money so we use auto scaling which allows us not to sacrifice the performance by using fewer resources and saving bills
Some of our internal cloud applications are based on AWS and almost all of them utilize the auto scaling feature. It's used across multiple engineering departments.
Pros
Functions well when configured correctly
Price is reasonable
Cons
Would be better if it can support more types of rules
Sometimes will over-provision which results in a waste of resources.
Likelihood to Recommend
When you have a simple auto scaling use case and it does not require complex rules.
We implement EC2 Auto Scaling in a variety of ways. It is used to prevent downtime or service degradation during or in preparation for heavy traffic volume, it is used as a disaster recovery sometimes in an auto-scaling group of 1 where an instance will recreate itself should it be determined to be unhealthy for any reason, and it is also used to segregate clusters of compute instances that handle different types of workloads.
Pros
Disaster recovery.
Ensures repeatability.
Handling expansion and growth.
Cons
Make it easier to understand health checks.
Use machine learning or other advanced techniques to auto-tune or auto-suggest tuning improvements to ASGs.
Automate the creation of them through a service broker on EKS.
Likelihood to Recommend
I cannot think of any reason to NOT use EC2 auto-scaling except if you're just quickly testing something on a single instance and plan to terminate it after.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Engineering (Internet company, 11-50 employees)
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a foundational component of the web - customer facing - tier of our multi-tier LAMP stack application. This allows us to scale in response to key metrics - such as CPU utilization on the web nodes - and maintain manageable traffic loads on each of the nodes in the autoscaling group. This translates to minimizing the frequency of overloaded EC2 instances requiring intervention (in some cases automated, in other cases manual) in order to be able to serve traffic again. This in turn means that the load balancer is able to serve traffic and that we are minimizing the number of 5XX errors that are surfaced to end users. This is in use in all of our AWS hosted applications. High availability is the business problem that this solves for us, as explained above.
Pros
Dynamic scaling can be configured to respond to a wide variety of metrics and alerts
Predictive scaling allows one to get ahead of high traffic events rather than simply reacting to them
Health checks are configurable based on the needs of your application and architecture
Cons
It can be confusing if you have multiple scaling policies in effect for an autoscaling group and they conflict. In that case, conflict resolution is handled by whichever policy has the greater impact. It would be more ideal if there was intelligence preventing these kinds of conflicting policies
It can be confusing if you have conflicting and concurrent scale out and scale in policies in effect. In this case, the scale out action will take place, in order to ensure availability. It would be more ideal if there was intelligence preventing these kinds of conflicting policies
IAM is always a bit confusing and the appropriate service roles are required to configure autoscaling correctly
Likelihood to Recommend
EC2 Auto Scaling is a foundational component of high availability architectures in AWS. It allows one to dynamically scale in response to key metrics - such as CPU utilization on the web nodes - or schedule scaling based on anticipated events - such as a flash sale for an e-commerce site. By scaling horizontally, one saves money by not having to scale up to peak traffic. By maintaining manageable traffic loads on each of the nodes in the autoscaling group, one minimizes the incidence of nodes in the autoscaling group failing, which translates to higher availability of the application served by the instances. This is not to mention the possibility of hardware failure on the AWS side, a low likelihood but totally possible event. High availability is not purely a frontend or backend concern. Anything you can do with EC2s that benefits from high availability benefits from autoscaling.
VU
Verified User
Contributor in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1001-5000 employees)
