REL07-BP02 Obtain resources upon detection of impairment to a
workload
Scale resources reactively when necessary if availability is impacted, to restore workload availability.
You first must configure health checks and the criteria on these checks to indicate when availability is impacted by lack of resources. Then either notify the appropriate personnel to manually scale the resource, or trigger automation to automatically scale it.
Scale can be manually adjusted for your workload, for example, changing the number of EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group or modifying throughput of a DynamoDB table can be done through the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI. However automation should be used whenever possible (refer to Use automation when obtaining or scaling resources).
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium
Implementation guidance
Obtain resources upon detection of impairment to a workload. Scale resources reactively when necessary if availability is impacted, to restore workload availability.
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Use scaling plans, which are the core component of AWS Auto Scaling, to configure a set of instructions for scaling your resources. If you work with AWS CloudFormation or add tags to AWS resources, you can set up scaling plans for different sets of resources, per application. AWS Auto Scaling provides recommendations for scaling strategies customized to each resource. After you create your scaling plan, AWS Auto Scaling combines dynamic scaling and predictive scaling methods together to support your scaling strategy.
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Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you ensure that you have the correct number of Amazon EC2 instances available to handle the load for your application. You create collections of EC2 instances, called Auto Scaling groups. You can specify the minimum number of instances in each Auto Scaling group, and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling ensures that your group never goes below this size. You can specify the maximum number of instances in each Auto Scaling group, and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling ensures that your group never goes above this size.
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Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling uses the AWS Application Auto Scaling service to dynamically adjust provisioned throughput capacity on your behalf, in response to actual traffic patterns. This enables a table or a global secondary index to increase its provisioned read and write capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic, without throttling.
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Resources
Related documents:
