If you provision enough capacity to always handle your peak traffic load, Black Friday, for example, you are wasting money. It would be better to match compute power with demand. That’s what Auto Scaling let’s you do, the automatic resizing of compute clusters.
You can define the minimum and maximum size of your pools. As a user you decide what’s the smallest number of instances in your cluster and the largest number of instances.
CloudWatch is a management service that’s embedded into all applications.
- CloudWatch events drive scaling.
- Are you going to scale on CPU utilization? Are you going to scale on latency? On network traffic?
- You can also push your own custom metrics into CloudWatch. If you want to scale on something application specific you can push that metric into CloudWatch and then tell Auto Scaling you want to scale on that metric.