AWS Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling

You never know when your application or a website becomes an overnight hit and users might spike unknowingly. Traffic would increase and users might face latency and performance issues!!! These scenarios can be tackled by implementing Load Balancers and Auto Scaling in your environment.

So how these Load Balancers and Auto Scaling help you?

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, Lambda functions, and virtual appliances. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.

AWS Auto Scaling monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Using AWS Auto Scaling, it’s easy to set up application scaling for multiple resources across multiple services in minutes.

Load balancers first or Auto Scaling first?

If you are looking to build an application with high performance, fast, reliable, and cost-effective, you need to use both services. Deploy Load Balancer to equally distribute your traffic followed by Auto Scaling to efficiently scale your services.

Different types of Load Balancers are as below:

1. Application Load Balancer - Application Load Balancer is best suited for load balancing of HTTP and HTTPS traffic and provides advanced request routing. Application Load Balancer routes traffic to targets within Amazon VPC based on the content of the request.
2. Network Load Balancer - Network Load Balancer is best suited for load balancing of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and Transport Layer Security (TLS) traffic where extreme performance is required. Network Load Balancer routes traffic to targets within Amazon VPC and is capable of handling millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies.
3. Gateway Load Balancer - Gateway Load Balancer makes it easy to deploy, scale, and run third-party virtual networking appliances. Providing load balancing and auto-scaling for fleets of third-party appliances, Gateway Load Balancer is transparent to the source and destination of the traffic. This capability makes it well suited for working with third-party appliances for security, network analytics, and other use cases.
4. Classic Load Balancer - Classic Load Balancer provides basic load balancing across multiple Amazon EC2 instances and operates at both the request and connection levels. Classic Load Balancer is intended for applications that were built within the EC2-Classic network.

Have a practical look at how to setup Load Balancer.

What is an Auto Scaling group?

An Auto Scaling group contains a collection of Amazon EC2 instances that are treated as a logical grouping for the purposes of automatic scaling and management. An Auto Scaling group also enables you to use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling features such as health check replacements and scaling policies.

It’s easy to get started with AWS Auto Scaling using the AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface (CLI), or SDK. AWS Auto Scaling is available at no additional charge. You pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications and Amazon CloudWatch monitoring fees.

Benefits of AWS Auto Scaling are Setup Scaling Quickly, Make smart scaling decisions, Automatically maintain performance and Pay only for what you need.

Learn practical things about setting up of Auto Scaling Group, Launch Configuration, Scale out and Scale in Policies in the below video.

Video courtesy: KnowledgeIndia Youtube channel.

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