Auto Scaling:Usage process

Background information

This topic describes how to use Auto Scaling in the console. For information about how to use API operations to manage resources, see Process introduction.

The following figure shows the usage process of Auto Scaling.

Video tutorial

You can watch the following video to learn about how to get started with Auto Scaling.

Procedure

1. Manage scaling groups.

   A scaling group is a basic management unit when you use Auto Scaling to manage Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances on which your business is deployed. Scaling groups are used to manage ECS instances that are applied to the same scenario and can be associated with multiple Server Load Balancer (SLB) instances and ApsaraDB RDS instances. After a scaling group is associated with SLB and RDS instances, ECS instances that are added to the scaling group are automatically added as backend servers of the associated SLB instances. The internal IP addresses of these instances are automatically added to the whitelists of the associated RDS instances.

2. Create scaling configurations for scaling groups that contain ECS instances.
   A scaling configuration is a template used by Auto Scaling to automatically create ECS instances. You can create multiple scaling configurations for a scaling group. However, only one scaling configuration can be active at a time. For more information, see Overview.

   Note If you use a launch template or an existing instance as the configuration source when you create a scaling group, you can enable the scaling group without the need to manually create a scaling configuration.
3. Enable the scaling group.

   The first time you create a scaling configuration, you are prompted to enable the scaling group. You can also enable the scaling group on the Scaling Groups page. For more information, see Enable a scaling group.

4. Manage scaling rules.

   A scaling rule is used to specify information such as the number of ECS instances to be scaled or intelligently set the boundary values of a scaling group. You can create scaling rules of the corresponding type based on your business requirements. For more information, see Overview.

5. Create a scaling task.
   After a scaling rule is created, you can use a scaling task to automatically execute the scaling rule. Auto Scaling supports the following types of scaling tasks:

   • Scheduled tasks

     If you can predict the time when your business loads fluctuate, you can use scheduled tasks to automatically scale ECS instances at the specified time. You can set the recurrence for scheduled tasks to meet your periodic requirements for automatic scaling.

   • Event-triggered tasks

     If you want to automatically scale ECS instances based on their running metrics, you can use event-triggered tasks. An event-triggered task dynamically manages ECS instances in a scaling group based on monitoring metrics from CloudMonitor. For more information, see Overview.