Amazon Web Services: Auto scaling and Cloudwatch

 In this blog, we will discuss Amazon Web Services: Auto scaling and Cloudwatch

The question is : What does Auto scaling provides?  The answer is:

• Linear Horizontal Scaling 
• HA

Second question is What Cloud watch enables? Cloud watch enables:

• monitoring and alerting for resources
• Alarms Can fire auto scaling policies, SNS notifications

 auto scaling, ELB and Cloud watch makes up what Amazon calls Triangle services

AUTO SCALING SET UP

To set up Auto scaling, we need to do the following things:

• Create ELB( Its recommended but not necessary)
• Create Instances in 2 or more AZs ( Its recommended but not necessary

              a) Create Launch Config: Launch config consists of
                          1) EC2 instance launch profile
                          2) Image ID (AMI)
                          3) Instance Type ( e.g t1.micro or m1.small)
                          4) key pair ( recommended)
                          5) Security Group
                          6) Name

• Create Auto scaling Groups: In a auto scaling group you have AZs, Max or Min servers etc
• Create Auto scaling Policy: The policy consists of buttons that an API/Scheduled/ cloudwatch can push
• Create Cloud watch Alarms: Which can fire policies

CLOUD WATCH


Now we will briefly discuss cloud watch. So what does Cloud watch exactly do? Well, the answer is

1. Monitors/Alarms on resources
2. Basic Monitors provided free with most basic services ( EC2, ELB, SQS..etc)
3. Alarms can fire auto scaling policies or SNS notifications
4. cloud watch is statistics in , statistics out. below is an example

Cloud Watch alarms trigger when metric statistics goes in( or out  ) out of state for specific time

Hope it clears the functionality of cloud watch