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I had been running my website on Amazon AWS t1.micro instance backed on a EBS volume. As I had expected to happen over time, my memory consumption is now almost full and just has around 10 MB free. Thus, the website often slows down and file upload functions don't happen. I tried adding a auto scaling group, but that makes no differnce on the functioning. So I had the following doubts before I did pump up the ram:

  1. How is auto-scaling different from increasing the ram of my instance?
  2. Is it possible to increase the RAM without impacting the ip address? (I want to avoid any unwanted confusions and hassles related to changing the ip address at various places)

Please understand that I am a noob at this stuff.

EDIT: I have gone through the documentation at this link about resizing your instance But it mentions that I must keep note of the "elastic ip" and that it will change. I am not aware of what that is and whether if I carry on with the steps there, will I have to make changes in the dns server to point to a new ip, etc.

abhilashLenka
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  • Don't mess public IP and elastic IP. EIP tied to your account, and can be re-assigned to the new instance. In the document you mentioned: 'The instance retains its private IP addresses and any Elastic IP addresses.', so only public-not-elastic IP will change unless you have EC2-Classic instance (you didn't mention it). – Putnik May 31 '16 at 05:00

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Auto-Scaling will add more servers to a pool - most often configured in an Elastic Load Balancer.

Changing instance type will make one individual server more powerful.

You will most likely want to resize your instance if you have one web server and your code is not scalable - i.e if you're uploading files to the instance itself and not some shared platform like Amazon S3.

An Elastic IP is simply what Amazon calls a public IP address. If you resize your instance, your public IP will change, so you will need to update DNS.

Craig Watson
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  • So shouldn't auto-scaling solve my problem? But as I have observed auto scaling doesn't have any impact. Is it just to help with crowd and not with the base running requirements of my website? – abhilashLenka Mar 26 '15 at 15:40
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    Unfortunately auto-scaling isn't trivial to set up. Your application should be scalable and needs to store all uploaded resources to a shared storage platform. Autoscaling can shrink as well as grow, so you should also be able to kill any server without fear of losing any of your data. – Craig Watson Mar 26 '15 at 15:42
  • Also, the auto scaling groups policy, only provides an option to be triggered at cpu utilization parameters, disk reads, etc. but not at memory usage – abhilashLenka Mar 26 '15 at 15:42
  • @abhilashLenka This is because Amazon cannot see inside your instance to measure RAM usage. Scaling because of RAM usage isn't possible without sending custom metrics from within your instance to CloudWatch. – Craig Watson Mar 26 '15 at 15:43
  • thanks a lot for the help. I think your new answer, clears my doubts. – abhilashLenka Mar 26 '15 at 15:49
  • Same if i have a public ip assigned and not a static ip. right? – abhilashLenka Mar 26 '15 at 15:55
  • Sorry, I used "static" by mistake in my answer, I meant "public" :) – Craig Watson Mar 26 '15 at 16:01
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    sale up = instance type, scale out = autoscaling – dmourati Mar 26 '15 at 16:04
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    If you are using an Elastic IP then you do not need to update DNS. But if you are using the default public IP then you will need to update DNS. – Matt Houser Mar 27 '15 at 03:09
  • EIP is not the same as public IP, it is persistent and can be moved between instances. – Putnik May 31 '16 at 05:02