AWS Autoscaling: Maximising Efficiency and Minimising Downtime

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud computing platform that provides a range of services, including computing power, storage, and databases, to businesses and individuals.

In this blog, we will be looking into the benefits of AWS Autoscaling Group.

AWS Autoscaling Group automatically helps scale your EC2 instances up or down based on traffic, demand, or other specified criteria. The ability to automatically add or remove EC2 instances from your application in response to changes in traffic or other usage patterns is what it essentially allows you to do.

Here are some of the major advantages of AWS Autoscaling Group we can understand from the above example:

• Cost optimization: Autoscaling helps you save money by automatically scaling your EC2 instances up and down based on demand, so you don't have to keep instances running when they aren't required.

• High Availability: Autoscaling guarantees that your application is always accessible, even during periods of peak usage or traffic. Your user’s access to your application will remain uninterrupted if you expand its instances as necessary.

• Better Performance: With autoscaling, you can keep your application performing at a high level even when it is being used heavily or during peak traffic hours. Your users will have a seamless and responsive experience if you automatically add more resources to your application as needed.

• Improved Scalability and Simplified Management: With the help of autoscaling, you can quickly scale your application to adapt to changes in traffic or usage patterns. You can make sure that your application can handle unexpected spikes in traffic or usage by automatically adding more resources as needed as per the situation. This streamlines management and lowers the possibility of human error.

Project Overview and Objective:

Our client has an online shopping website that experiences a significant increase in traffic during the holiday season. There were times when due to a surge in online traffic at peak times, the server would go down and cause major losses to the business. We were tasked with the objective to make sure that there was minimal downtime and also make sure that the cost for the solution we give should not be a big implication for the client.

Solution:

After analyzing the application architecture and the causes of downtime, we decided to implement an Autoscaling group behind a load balancer to ensure that the web application can handle the increased load and automatically add more server resources when the traffic exceeds a certain threshold.

Once CPU utilization across the servers exceeded 70% for a period of five minutes, an additional server was added and the load balancer would distribute the incoming traffic across all the available servers, thereby ensuring that the website remains responsive and available to users.

In the same way, when the overall load was less than 60 % for a period of 15 minutes, the additional servers would be removed and the load balancer would redirect requests to the server which is available after the additional servers are removed.

Result:

After implementing the solution, the online shopping application faced minimal downtime and maximized efficiency. Since the additional servers were only used at peak times, the infrastructure cost also did not increase to great significance.

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