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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Faster Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with Target Tracking

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Overview

This Guidance demonstrates how to optimize your target tracking policies using high-resolution Amazon CloudWatch metrics for enhanced business performance and technical efficiency. By implementing sub-minute granularity metric tracking, organizations can achieve faster response times and improved system availability, potentially reducing operational costs. The solution enables seamless integration with existing target tracking policies or creation of new ones, providing businesses with more precise and responsive auto scaling capabilities. This approach helps organizations maintain optimal resource utilization while ensuring their applications remain highly available and cost-effective in dynamic workload environments.

Benefits

Deploy high-resolution metrics with CloudWatch Agent to enable sub-minute scaling decisions. Reduce the need for excess capacity while maintaining application availability during unexpected traffic increases.

Leverage Target Tracking's dynamic threshold adjustments based on historical trends to scale precisely when needed. Pay only for the compute resources your workload requires at any given moment, eliminating wasteful overprovisioning.

Let Target Tracking automatically create and manage CloudWatch alarms based on your performance targets. Focus on your applications while AWS handles the complex calculations determining when and how much to scale your infrastructure.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

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Deploy with confidence

Ready to deploy? Review the sample code on GitHub for detailed deployment instructions to deploy as-is or customize to fit your needs. 

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Related content

Faster scaling with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Target Tracking

One of the key benefits of the AWS cloud is elasticity. It enables our users to provision and pay only for resources they need. To fully use the elasticity benefits, users needed a mechanism that is automated and can be widely operated with ease. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling solves these challenges by helping our users automatically scale the number of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to meet the changing workload demands, and it offers a wide suite of capabilities to manage the instance’s lifecycle.

Learn more

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.

References to third-party services or organizations in this Guidance do not imply an endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation between Amazon or AWS and the third party. Guidance from AWS is a technical starting point, and you can customize your integration with third-party services when you deploy the architecture.

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