Amazon Launches New Autoscaling Service On AWS

Scaling has always been the marquee feature of cloud, its outright primary advantage. Technologies like autoscaling have been designed to take it to the next level, but for most users they are hit or miss.

The ability to scale up to meet short term needs, and scale back when that need has been met sounds simple enough, but configuring it all still is a complicated affair — particularly for small developers and organizations that don’t have the necessary resources to set it all up perfectly.

Fret not, as Amazon is here to simplify things.

The cloud giant has announced a new service on AWS that greatly simplifies autoscaling for developers.

Amazon’s own Jeff Barr explaines:

“You no longer need to set up alarms and scaling actions for each resource and each service. Instead, you simply point AWS Auto Scaling at your application and select the services and resources of interest. Then you select the desired scaling option for each one, and AWS Auto Scaling will do the rest, helping you to discover the scalable resources and then creating a scaling plan that addresses the resources of interest.”

Up until now, customers that use multiple AWS services to build their applications required a fair amount of work to ensure that the various pieces of their cloud workload were scaling as necessary.

This new service provides them access to a set of autoscaling options.

Options that they can use to balance cost, availability, or a combination of the two. Depending, of course, on the specific requirements of a given application on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.

After setting up a scaling threshold, AWS Auto Scaling creates a set of specific scaling policies, based upon the configuration. It basically involves creating a scaling configuration plan where set scaling targets for each resource are specified.

Amazon has made this new feature available in US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions.

With more to follow, in due time.