How to auto scale my instance in Amazon EC2?

Question

I just have created Amazon EC2 image and I'm new to this environment.

I'm interested in "auto scale" part of Amazon EC2.

But I could not find clear guide to find whether I'm using "auto scale" or not and how to auto scale my instance.

How can I setup "auto scale" properly and easily?

Answer 1

Here are some links that might help you setup auto-scaling:

1. http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/2011/01/auto-scaling-with-amazon-ec2.html
2. http://www.codebelay.com/blog/2009/08/02/how-to-load-balance-and-auto-scale-with-amazons-ec2/

Answer 2

You will need to download, unzip and setup the Auto Scaling Command Line Tool

You will need an AMI e.g. ami-xxxxxx

and a security group e.g. my-securitygroup-sg

and a key e.g. myKey

Now create a Launch Configuration, in this case called: my-launch-config-1

as-create-launch-config my-launch-config-1 --image-id ami-xxxxxx --region eu-west-1 --instance-type m1.small --group my-securitygroup-sg --key myKey

Then you can create the Auto Scaling Group

as-create-auto-scaling-group my-auto-scaling-group --region eu-west-1 --launch-configuration my-launch-config-1 --availability-zones eu-west-1a eu-west-1b eu-west-1c --min-size 3 --max-size 3 --desired-capacity 3 --default-cooldown 5 --grace-period 5 --tag "k=Name, v=my-servers, p=true" --tag "k=enabled, v=true, p=true"

This will create 3 instances base on the AMI, one in each zone

You can check on the progress of the creation of the Auto Scaling group using this command

as-describe-scaling-activities --auto-scaling-group my-auto-scaling-group --region eu-west-1

You can find more useful commands for things like deleting or updating Auto Scaling Group in my blog post:

How to use Amazon’s Auto Scaling Groups

Or there is the Amazon Web Services getting started documentation

Answer 3

You also have a look into this blog, http://geekospace.com/installing-aws-command-line-tools-from-amazon-downloads/

Answer 4

Auto Scaling is a tool that uses the results from Amazon CloudWatch to define the scaling policies on various instances. Auto Scaling gives you power to decide the scaling, Schedule it and also define the resource to be scaled. These configurations are stored under an Auto Scaling Group and can be used to track applications working over various instances.