Autoscaling, also spelled auto scaling or auto-scaling, and sometimes also called automatic scaling, is a method used in cloud computing, whereby the amount of computational resources in a server farm, typically measured in terms of the number of active servers, scales automatically based on the load on the farm. It is closely related to, and builds upon, the idea of load balancing.
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Advantages
Autoscaling offers the following advantages:
Autoscaling differs from having a fixed daily, weekly, or yearly cycle of server use in that it is responsive to actual usage patterns, and thus reduces the potential downside of having too few or too many servers for the traffic load. For instance, if traffic is usually lower at midnight, then a static scaling solution might schedule some servers to sleep at night, but this might result in downtime on a night where people happen to use the Internet more (for instance, due to a viral news event). Autoscaling, on the other hand, can handle unexpected traffic spikes better.
Terminology
In the list below, we use the terminology used by Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, alternative names are noted and terminology that is specific to the names of Amazon services is not used for the names.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services launched the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service in August 2006, that allowed developers to programmatically create and terminate instances (machines). At the time of initial launch, AWS did not offer autoscaling, but the ability to programmatically create and terminate instances gave developers the flexibility to write their own code for autoscaling.
Third-party autoscaling solutions for AWS began appearing around April 2008. These included tools by Scalr and RightScale. RightScale's autoscaling solution was used by Animoto, that was able to handle huge scale of Facebook traffic by adopting autoscaling.
On May 18, 2009, Amazon launched its own autoscaling feature along with Elastic Load Balancing, as part of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Autoscaling is now an integral component of Amazon's EC2 offering. Autoscaling on Amazon Web Services is done through a web browser or the command line tool.
On-demand video provider Netflix has documented their successful use of autoscaling with Amazon Web Services to meet their highly variable consumer needs. They found that aggressive scaling up and delayed and cautious scaling down served their goals of uptime and responsiveness best.
In an article for TechCrunch, Zev Laderman, the co-founder and CEO of Newvem, a service that helps optimize AWS cloud infrastructure, recommended that startups use autoscaling in order to keep their Amazon Web Services costs low.
Various best practice guides for AWS use suggest using its autoscaling feature even in cases where the load is not variable. That is because autoscaling offers two other advantages: automatic replacement of any instances that become unhealthy for any reason (such as hardware failure, network failure, or application error), and automatic replacement of spot instances that get interrupted for price or capacity reasons, making it more feasible to use spot instances for production purposes. Netflix's internal best practices require every instance to be in an autoscaling group, and its conformity monkey terminates any instance not in an autoscaling group in order to enforce this best practice.
Microsoft's Windows Azure
On June 27, 2013, Microsoft announced that it was adding autoscaling support to its Windows Azure cloud computing platform. Documentation for the feature is available on the Microsoft Developer Network.
Google Cloud Platform
On November 17, 2014, the Google Compute Engine announced a public beta of its autoscaling feature for use in Google Cloud Platform applications. As of March 2015, the autoscaling tool is still in Beta.
In a blog post in August 2014, a Facebook engineer disclosed that the company had started using autoscaling to bring down its energy costs. The blog post reported a 27% decline in energy use for low traffic hours (around midnight) and a 10-15% decline in energy use over the typical 24-hour cycle.
Alternatives to autoscaling
Autoscaling is a reactive method of dealing with traffic scaling: scaling only happens in response to real-time changes in metrics. In some cases, particularly when the changes occur very quickly, this reactive approach to scaling is insufficient. Two other kinds of scaling are described below. Autoscaling solutions such as that by AWS allow the use of these types of scaling with existing autoscaling groups, even though they are conceptually somewhat different from autoscaling.
Scheduled scaling
This is an approach to scaling where changes are made to the minimum size, maximum size, or desired capacity of the autoscaling group at specific times of day. Scheduled scaling is useful, for instance, if there is a known traffic load increase or decrease at specific times of the day, but the change is too sudden for autoscaling to respond fast enough. AWS autoscaling groups support scheduled scaling.
Predictive scaling
This approach to scaling uses predictive analytics. The idea is to combine recent usage trends with historical usage data as well as other kinds of data to predict usage in the future, and scale based on these predictions. For parts of their infrastructure and specific workloads, Netflix found that Scryer, their predictive analytics engine, gave better results than Amazon's autoscaling. In particular, it was better for: