Auto Scaling Follow the Line

Perhaps you expect a lot of traffic as part of a planned announcement and you want to increase the size of your EC2 fleet just ahead of your press release. Maybe your site is busy once a day because you have a daily deal or a daily special, or only on weekends when people are at sporting events. Or maybe you run a college registration site and you want to scale up during day and evening hours for the four-day registration period.

You can now use scheduled actions to tell Auto Scaling to perform a scaling action at a certain point in time. This means that you can now create sophisticated scaling designs which take in to account actual system load as well as anticipated future activities.

A scheduled action consists of a date (which can be up to one month in the future), a time, and the minimum, maximum, and desired size of an Auto Scaling Group. You can create multiple scheduled actions for each group using the as-put-scheduled-update-group-action command or by calling the PutScheduledUpdateGroupAction function. You can also update the scheduled actions for a group as your needs and load expectations change.

You can list your scheduled actions using as-describe-scheduled-actions command or by calling the DescribeScheduledActions function. Either way, you’ll need to mention the name of one of your Auto Scaling Groups.

Once your scheduled activities have taken place, you can use the as-describe-scaling-activities command to verify that the results were in line with your expectations.

You can create up to 125 actions, scheduled up to 31 days into the future, for each of your auto scaling groups. This gives you the ability to scale up to four times a day for a month.

Next feature: Auto Scaling Policies.

— Jeff;