
AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support - turbo_pax
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/12/aws-management-console-auto-scaling-support.html?hn
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lreeves
It always struck me as odd that one of the original defining features of AWS
never had a web interface. Maybe they were making it API-only to protect
people from shooting themselves in the foot with exorbitant bills. Regardless
through I'm really glad to see this finally!

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bmelton
I think another part of it is that an API interface actually makes more sense.
While the necessity for the non-technically inclined are pretty obvious, auto-
scaling shouldn't usually be done reactively, and doing so is at the expense
of optimal service delivery.

That said, I can imagine a good number of times it could come in handy, even
for the techiest of us.

It might have simply not been the lowest hanging fruit, and the one thing I
keep noticing that with AWS is that there are only two types of features they
roll out -- new SKUs (e.g., something new that they can charge money for) and
services that they should have written a long time ago, but probably didn't,
because they were too busy launching new SKUs.

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derefr
> auto-scaling shouldn't usually be done reactively, and doing so is at the
> expense of optimal service delivery.

You can react predictively (or predict reactively, whichever way you want to
say it.)

Set up a cascade control system, training it as it runs on (process load x
cost-of-scale.) It will begin to "see the signs" of load being about to occur,
and adjust accordingly to reduce it. You know, just like any modern
thermostat.

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bmelton
You can. I even qualified that in the next line. ;-)

Even easier, you could just say "Scale it up, we're demoing this to 3,000
users at PyCon", and do that proactively as well -- that said, it's likely
done at the expense of efficiency or cost.

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ladon86
After I just spent ages setting this up via the API!

Actually there is a nice, cheap service called ezautoscaling.com - looks like
a hacker side project but supports the full API _including_ schedules, which I
think are missing from the official AWS offering.

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ceejayoz
You can do scheduling with OpsWorks, I believe.

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kolev
I actually hate Amazon for exposing these features - now, my boss will be
mucking around with them! As a DevOps guy, nothing beats AWS CLI and
CloudFormation!

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jeffbarr
That's what IAM is for. Create a playground for your boss and let him or her
muck around in safety.

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kolev
Well, you tell my boss that he shouldn't be a full admin. :)

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switch007
How about trying to create a change management process (supported by some time
that someone other than your boss made a disastrous change)? Get him on board
about how important that process is, especially when working in a team and
something as critical as AWS. hint hint..

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kolev
That's already in place. I personally use the Web Console as a read-only tool,
but it's hard to keep a manager with past developer background away from
poking around - policies are for the mere mortals! :)

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sandGorgon
A question for other startups running a small time stack on top of AWS - how
are you managing your scale up/scale down/fault tolerance on top of EC2 ? For
a small startup, we are not really talking OpsWorks - so what tools allow you
to do this. I'm trying to do this in a really small way for a project - but
there are way too many deployment/monitoring/management tools to wrap my head
around.

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themckman
Along the same lines, I'm interested in how people handle the case of auto-
scaling their web app (or anything that updates frequently via deploys). Is
there a better solution than imaging a machine on every deploy and updating
the auto scaling group to use the new AMI?

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gazarsgo
How are you deploying? You 'should' push a tarball to s3 and have web nodes
pull it down.

Red-black deploys via AMI changes are one way for sure, but those seem to be
usually done via separate scaling groups entirely. Netflix has a lot of
automation around this (see Asgard and AMInator)

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datums
RightScale was the first with this feature, before it was available via the
api. I'm looking forward to seeing how each cloud provider handles the UI for
all this data.

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smtddr
I'm going to piggy-back on this comment and mention that Rackspace recently
added auto-scale as well, FWIW.

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conorgil145
This is excellent news! I was just about to start exploring the auto-scaling
capability for our cluster. Even if the API has more flexibility/options, this
should make it much easier to get started with the basics.

Now I just wish AWS management console itself got some TLC.....it can be
pretty difficult and cumbersome to use sometimes. Even products for fellow
devs should have beautiful UIs.

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coop182
Is it just me or is there still no option to do scheduled scaling from the web
interface? Regardless this is still cool!

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dmourati
I just searched for this again this week. Finally in the console. I do prefer
the api once I understand something but the console is great for a first walk
through.

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nickbauman
Funny. Google App Engine auto scaled from day one.

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kolev
People still use Google AppEngine with its outrageous pricing?

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kolev
Thanks for the downvote, but my experience is that for a relatively small
project we started to receive $200+ monthly bills and had to switch to EC2.

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kolev
Very small, but frequent DB updates. I wasn't responsible for the software,
but simply put, it was a backend for a not-so-popular Chrome extension, which
was doing authentication and persisting some state (a few integers). I'm sure
the architecture could've been optimized specifically for AppEngine to reduce
the cost, but why do you need to invest so much effort in optimizing something
so basic that works just fine on EC2 m1.small or Digital Ocean for few bucks
per month?

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npinguy
Nice one!

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zerop
I would rather like to see better CPU performance first then auto-scale. Awful
CPU performance is what keeping me away from EC2, trying linode nowadays..

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e1g
The new C3.Large is cheaper than M1.Large (and only marginally more expensive
than the old M1.Medium), but its CPU performance is roughly twice as good.
Swapping over made a notable difference for our web nodes (perhaps 30-40%
reduction in server time for the web-facing tier).

C3's instance-level SSD drives are a very nice touch as well.

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ceejayoz
It should be noted, though, that the c3.large has half the RAM of the
m1.large.

