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Auto scaling is a cloud computing feature that allows users to automatically scale cloud services, like virtual machines (VM) and server capacities, up or down, depending on defined situations. Cloud computing providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), offer this feature.
Auto scaling also ensures that new instances are seamlessly increased during demand spikes and decreased during demand drops, enabling consistent performance for lower costs.
Techopedia Explains Auto Scaling
Auto scaling is an implementation of the dynamic scaling feature of cloud computing, which can be applied manually or automatically. Increasingly, cloud service providers are offering this feature due to the unpredictable demand for cloud capabilities.
When a traffic campaign does well, generated traffic may be much higher than expected, leaving servers unprepared for spikes in activity. In such cases, there may not be enough time to manually provision new instances and resources. Auto scaling is geared toward solving this common problem.
In some cases, however, auto scaling actually increases costs because it is not always possible to determine whether a usage spike is legitimate or the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, when servers scale to address increased traffic. This creates a cost without the benefit of real traffic, and because the cloud’s resources are so great that the service never actually goes down, a continuous rise in costs results. The solution is a smarter monitoring tool that can distinguish between real traffic and an attack.
