Posted On: May 27, 2022
Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) provides a Cluster Auto Scaling (CAS) capability to dynamically manage the scaling of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Auto Scaling groups (ASG) on your behalf, so that you can focus on running your containers. Capacity Providers is the compute interface that links your Amazon ECS cluster with your ASG. With Capacity Providers, you can define flexible rules for how containerized workloads run on different types of compute capacity, and manage the scaling of the capacity. Capacity Providers improve the availability, scalability, and cost of running tasks and services on ECS. Starting today, we are simplifying the integration mechanism between Capacity Providers and ASGs by directly integrating with target-tracking scaling policy instead of relying on AWS Auto Scaling scaling plan.
Capacity Providers automatically scale the infrastructure capacity within your ASG, based on your target capacity configuration. Previously, Amazon ECS created an AWS Auto Scaling scaling plan containing a singular target-tracking scaling policy to manage the target capacity for the associated ASG. The target-tracking scaling policy ensured that your ASG had the requisite number of Amazon EC2 instances to support your workloads. With today’s launch, we have simplified the Capacity Provider-ASG integration by removing the additional layer of scaling plan, such that Capacity Provider will now directly create the same target-tracking policy for managing CAS. This change will automatically apply to all new Capacity Providers you create. You do not need to take any action to update your existing Capacity Providers. They will continue to function as before, with a scaling plan that contains the target-tracking scaling policy.
To learn more about how Cluster Auto Scaling works and additional information on this update, please see our documentation.