ℹ️ Information: Auto Scaling Groups automatically adjust your application’s compute capacity based on demand, ensuring optimal performance while controlling costs. In this section, we’ll configure an Auto Scaling Group to dynamically manage our EC2 instances behind the Application Load Balancer.
⚠️ Warning: Our testing revealed performance instability when the application receives high traffic volumes. While manually adding EC2 instances and distributing traffic with a Load Balancer helps, this approach is impractical for several reasons:
Auto Scaling solves these challenges by automatically adjusting capacity based on defined policies.
Navigate to the Auto Scaling Group creation interface:
In the Auto Scaling group creation wizard:
FCJ-Management-ASG
FCJ-Management-template
ℹ️ Information: The launch template contains all the configuration details needed to launch instances, including the AMI, instance type, key pair, security groups, and user data scripts.
⚠️ Warning: The ASG name should match the name specified in section 2.6 for Predictive Scaling configuration. The launch template must include all required components (MySQL Client, Node.js, application source code, and PM2) for proper instance functionality.
In the network configuration section:
💡 Pro Tip: Distributing instances across multiple Availability Zones improves application reliability. If one AZ experiences issues, instances in other AZs continue serving traffic.
Connect your Auto Scaling Group to the previously created load balancer:
ℹ️ Information: When properly configured, the dropdown will display your existing target group, confirming that both the Application Load Balancer and Target Group are correctly set up.
For additional configuration:
Under Monitoring:
💡 Pro Tip: CloudWatch metrics provide valuable insights into your Auto Scaling Group’s performance, helping you fine-tune scaling policies and troubleshoot issues.
Define the initial capacity and scaling boundaries:
For scaling policies:
For instance maintenance:
ℹ️ Information: We’re deferring scaling policy configuration because we’ll implement and compare multiple scaling strategies in subsequent sections.
Set up Amazon SNS notifications to monitor Auto Scaling events:
asg-topic
Review your configuration and click Create Auto Scaling group.
🔒 Security Note: Notifications provide real-time awareness of scaling events, helping you monitor for unexpected behavior that could indicate security issues or application problems.
After creation, you’ll receive confirmation emails:
Verify the Auto Scaling activity in the AWS Management Console:
⚠️ Warning: As we implement different scaling strategies in subsequent sections, you may receive numerous notification emails. This is intentional to help you monitor scaling activities.
💡 Pro Tip: Auto Scaling Groups work best when combined with CloudWatch alarms that trigger scaling actions based on metrics like CPU utilization, network traffic, or custom application metrics. We’ll explore these options in upcoming sections.