WORKING WITH AMAZON EC2 AUTO SCALING GROUPS

Learn to automatically scale up or down your EC2 infrastructure using Auto Scaling Groups

Lab Overview

This lab introduces the basics of Auto Scaling in Amazon Web Services. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Auto Scaling service automatically adds or removes compute resources allocated for your cloud application, in response to changes in demand. For applications configured to run on a cloud infrastructure, scaling is an important part of cost control and resource management.

Scaling is the ability to increase or decrease the compute capacity of your application either by changing the number of servers (horizontal scaling) or by changing the size of the servers (vertical scaling).

Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to the defined conditions. You can use Auto Scaling to help ensure that you are running your desired number of Amazon EC2 instances. Auto Scaling can also automatically increase the number of Amazon EC2 instances during demand spikes to maintain performance and decrease capacity during lulls to reduce costs. Auto Scaling is well suited to applications that have stable demand patterns, or that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage.

In this lab, you will create an Auto Scaling Group and place it behind an Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). Don't worry if you don't fully understand all the components yet. Each one will be discussed in greater detail as you create and configure them. At the end of this lab you will have an Auto Scaling Group with several web server instances behind an ELB.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this Lab you will be able to:

Configure Auto Scaling to automatically launch web server instances
Utilize Auto Scaling to ensure the availability of steady state resources
Create and configure an Elastic Load Balancer
Build an elastic cluster by integrating Auto Scaling with an Elastic Load Balancer
Set CloudWatch alarms to automatically notify you when scaling events occur based on CPU utilization

Lab Prerequisites

Although this is a beginner level lab, you should be familiar with AWS basics including:

Using the AWS Console
EC2 (creating and launching a basic instance, creating a security key pair)
Conceptual understanding of CloudWatch, Simple Notification Service (SNS) and EC2 Security Groups (firewall rules)

Lab Environment

After completing the lab instructions the environment will look similar to:

Follow these steps to learn by building helpful cloud resources

Log In to the Amazon Web Service Console

Your first step to start the laboratory experience

Auto Scaling Overview

Give an overview about the creation process of an Auto Scaling Group

Create a load balancer using ELB

Create a classic load balancer using AWS Elastic Load Balancing service

Create a Launch Configuration

Create an Auto Scaling Launch Configuration for repeatable, consistent results

Create an Auto Scaling Group

Create an Auto Scaling Group to utilize a Launch Configuration for a web cluster

End to end Testing (EC2 Auto Scaling Groups)

End to end test of Auto Scaling group, Launch Configuration and Elastic Load Balancer