Auto-Scaling
CloudCaptain can automatically configure AWS to auto-scale your application based on any of the following metrics:
- average CPU usage
- incoming network traffic
- outgoing network traffic
CloudCaptain will then configure AWS CloudWatch to monitor and act upon these metrics for your application.
Whenever the current load of your system exceeds the thresholds defined, the AWS auto-scaling group will then automatically add or remove capacity so that you never have to worry again about paying for more than you actually need. All that while having the peace of mind your system will always have enough capacity to serve your users, regardless of traffic spikes.
Note: This is only available for load-balanced applications.
Using the CloudCaptain Console
You can easily set up your application to auto-scale on AWS within a specific environment:
All you need to do is drag a slider to indicate the minimum and the maximum number of instances you want, and specify at which CPU usage thresholds the scaling activities should happen, and click Scale. CloudCaptain and AWS will take care of the rest.
Just as for the command-line tool, CloudCaptain will automatically configure AWS CloudWatch to monitor the CPU usage of your instances. If the rolling average over a period of 300 seconds exceeds 75%, Auto-Scaling will kick in and additional EC2 instances will be provisioned up to a maximum of 10. If CPU usage instead drops to 25% or below, EC2 instances will be terminated down to a minimum of 2.
Using the CloudCaptain Command-line client
Alternatively to the method described above, you can also simply use the CloudCaptain Command-line Client to configure this:
> boxfuse scale myapp -env=prod -capacity=2-10:t2.micro:cpu25-75:300 Successfully configured myapp to auto-scale between 2 and 10 t2.micro instances based on average CPU load over 300 seconds, scaling in at 25% and below, scaling out at 75% and above.
And that's all! CloudCaptain will automatically configure AWS CloudWatch to monitor the CPU usage of your instances. If the rolling average over a period of 300 seconds exceeds 75%, Auto-Scaling will kick in and additional EC2 instances will be provisioned up to a maximum of 10. If CPU usage instead drops to 25% or below, EC2 instances will be terminated down to a minimum of 2.
For more details and full syntax details for all available options, read the documentation for the scale command.