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Benefits

Auto Scaling provides the following benefits: automation, cost-effectiveness, high availability, flexibility, intelligence, and easy audit.

Automation

Auto Scaling performs automatic scaling based on your configurations to prevent the errors caused by manual intervention.

  • Scale-out activities: Auto Scaling automatically creates the specified number of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances or elastic container instances and adds them to your scaling group to provide sufficient computing power to meet your business requirements.
  • Scale-in activities: Auto Scaling automatically removes the specified number of ECS instances or elastic container instances from your scaling group to release idle resources at the earliest opportunity.

Cost-effectiveness

Auto Scaling provisions resources when the demand for the resources increases and releases resources when the demand for the resources decreases. This improves resource utilization and significantly reduces costs.

  • You do not need to prepare extra ECS instances or elastic container instances to ensure service availability during peak hours. You also do not need to worry about the waste of resources. Auto Scaling scales computing resources at the earliest opportunity. This significantly reduces your resource costs.
  • Auto Scaling also helps you save manpower and time.

High availability

Auto Scaling can detect whether an ECS instance or elastic container instance in your scaling group is healthy or whether the instance runs as expected. If Auto Scaling detects that an ECS instance or elastic container instance in your scaling group does not run as expected, Auto Scaling considers the instance unhealthy and replaces the instance with a new instance to ensure service availability. You can use Auto Scaling to detect unhealthy ECS instances or elastic container instances at the earliest opportunity and replace the unhealthy instances without interruption to your business.

Flexibility and intelligence

Auto Scaling provides a rich set of intelligent features that are suitable for diverse business scenarios and help simplify your configurations. This improves operational efficiency.

  • Scaling modes: Auto Scaling supports the fixed-number mode, health mode, scheduled mode, dynamic mode, and custom mode. You can combine these scaling modes based on your business requirements. In dynamic mode, you can use CloudMonitor to monitor Auto Scaling resources. You can call API operations to interconnect external monitoring systems with CloudMonitor. For more information.
  • Instance configuration sources: Auto Scaling supports more than one instance configuration source. For example, you can specify an existing instance as the instance configuration source or create a scaling configuration from scratch. If you set the Type parameter to ECS when you create a scaling group, you can also specify a launch template as the instance configuration source.
  • Scaling policies: If you set the Type parameter to ECS when you create a scaling group, Auto Scaling provides various scaling policies. If you set the Type parameter to ECI when you create a scaling group, the default scaling policy is used.

Easy audit

Auto Scaling records the details of each scaling activity. This way, you can effectively identify and troubleshoot issues.
Auto Scaling also provides the monitoring feature. You can use CloudMonitor to monitor whether instances in your scaling group run as expected. This way, you can maintain service availability in an efficient manner.