Amazon Delivers Unified Control Of Auto-Scaling Functionality Across Cloud Services

AWS partners have long enjoyed the ability to set resources to scale automatically with the demand on customer workloads. A new feature from the cloud leader is the first to enable them to automate scaling across services from a single console, a major help to partners managing large and complex customer deployments.

AWS Auto Scaling is a unified interface that controls scaling for all AWS services that can automatically ramp and decrease the number of underlying instances delivering computational resources to optimize for cost and availability.

"This new service unifies and builds on our existing, service-specific, scaling features," said Jeff Barr, AWS' chief evangelist, in a blog post.

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AWS Auto Scaling integrates with Elastic Load Balancing, EC2 Auto Scaling, and the Amazon CloudWatch monitoring service. It also offers master control of auto-scaling functionality for services like Elastic Container Service, the DynamoDB and Aurora databases, and Elastic MapReduce. With a target tracking feature introduced last summer, users can choose the metric by which they scale resources.

"You no longer need to set up alarms and scaling actions for each resource and each service. Instead, you simply point AWS Auto Scaling at your application and select the services and resources of interest," Barr said.

The unified console allows administrators to select the desired scaling behavior for each service. The feature can also discover resources and help create scaling plans addressing those resources, Barr said.

Users can scale the number of operational instances to optimize availability, costs, or some unique combination of the two.

That capability is particularly useful to some of the largest AWS partners that manage complex deployments for customers taking advantage of manifold cloud services.

Rackspace, already among the largest AWS managed services providers – even before last year's acquisition of Datapipe – sees AWS Auto Scaling as an enabler of a consistent approach to managing the elasticity and scalability of compute and database resources, Jerry Hargrove, a solutions architect at Rackspace, told CRN.

"This new service allows Rackspace to easily customize application scaling options to match individual customer applications using easy to understand and targeted scaling strategies provided by Amazon," Hargrove said.

Those strategies, in turn, lead to simplified architectures and implementations, resulting in more efficient tailoring and tuning of auto-scaling behaviors to specific customer needs, he said.

"Rackspace customers ultimately benefit from AWS Auto Scaling by knowing that their AWS resources are being continuously monitored and resource levels adjusted based on their priorities, including availability, cost, or some balance between the two," Hargrove told CRN.