AWS Auto Scaling
AWS Auto Scaling is a service that automatically adjusts the number of Amazon EC2 instances or other AWS resources in an application to maintain performance and optimize costs. It monitors applications and automatically adds or removes capacity based on user-defined policies, schedules, and health checks. This ensures applications have the right resources at the right time, improving availability and fault tolerance.
AWS Auto Scaling itself is not the line item to fear: AWS says the service carries no additional charge. The costs are the compute, capacity, and monitoring you ask it to manage.
Developers should use AWS Auto Scaling for dynamic workloads that experience variable traffic, such as web applications, e-commerce sites, or batch processing jobs, to handle spikes in demand without manual intervention. It is essential for maintaining high availability and reducing costs by scaling down during low-traffic periods, making it a core component of cloud-native and serverless architectures on AWS.