AWS EC2 Scaling
AWS Tutorial: Scaling Amazon EC2
Welcome to the Scaling Amazon EC2 lesson. One of the primary reasons companies move to the cloud is "Elasticity"—the ability to scale resources precisely when they are needed.
Why Learn EC2 Scaling?
If an application suddenly goes viral or experiences high traffic, a single server will crash. Understanding scaling allows you to ensure high availability, smooth user experiences, and cost optimization during traffic lulls.
Tutorial Overview
In this tutorial, you will learn the fundamental differences between the two main types of scaling in cloud computing:
- Vertical Scaling (Scaling Up)
- Horizontal Scaling (Scaling Out)
Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling
- Vertical Scaling (Scaling Up): This means increasing the size and specifications of an individual instance. For example, moving from a
t2.micro(1 CPU, 1GB RAM) to at2.large(2 CPUs, 8GB RAM).- Pros: Easy to implement, no code changes needed.
- Cons: Has an upper limit (hardware ceiling), and usually requires downtime (restarting the server).
- Horizontal Scaling (Scaling Out): This means increasing the number of instances running your application. Instead of one massive server, you use five smaller servers working together.
- Pros: Virtually limitless scalability, offers high availability and fault tolerance.
- Cons: Requires the application architecture to be designed for distributed computing.
In modern cloud architecture, Horizontal Scaling is the strongly preferred method, combined with a Load Balancer to distribute traffic evenly across all the active instances.
Exercise
?If you add more EC2 instances to your application to handle traffic, what type of scaling are you using?