Auto Scaling In Cloud Computing

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Abdul Salam.

Cloud computing with its dynamic scaling feature which allows one to scale, that is to increase or decrease, the amount of resources depending on the demand has become a great boon for IT professionals everywhere. This is especially true for environments with very unpredictable traffic flow, like the whole internet for instance. With traditional servers that were preconfigured to handle a certain amount of load, a website might go down especially when traffic has suddenly surged to levels above the capacity of the server.

This happens when some sort of news or event leads people to a specific web location. The solution in a Cloud context is to allocate more resources, and in this case allocate more server instances. But do the costs of the additional resources merit the possible profits generated by the increased traffic? Or will they actually be enough to accommodate all of the traffic, and even has a margin for more?…

Traffic to a website could be intentionally routed there, as in a traffic campaign, so there might be a certain amount of expected traffic resulting from that campaign. But sometimes the campaign might have done better than expected and website traffic can go way above expected levels, even beyond the capacity of the servers of the newly allocated servers, so the website goes down losing revenue and potential customers. But with auto scaling, a web admin can set governors or settings that will constantly monitor the traffic to look for patterns that indicate that a lot of traffic will be coming in soon, then allocate proper resources to accommodate such traffic before it arrives…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2013/06/auto-scaling-in-cloud-computing/