This Lab introduces the basics of Auto Scaling in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The 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 the 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 for applications that have stable demand patterns, or that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. 

Learning Objectives

By the end of this Lab, you should be able to:

• Understand user data
• Describe and create a launch template

Prerequisites

This is a beginner level Lab, however, in order to follow the next steps you should be able to:

• Describe and launch EC2 instances
• Describe, create, and configure Security Groups

Updates 

October 30th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

May 16th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

October 23rd, 2021 - Resolved an issue related to service linked roles that caused the Auto Scaling group to fail to create in some cases

August 16th, 2021 - Minor update to security group instructions to reflect latest user-interface change

August 19th, 2020 - Migrate from launch configurations to launch templates

June 27th, 2019 - Added a custom validation lab step to check the work performed in the lab

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab