Load Balancing and Auto-scaling

1. Load Balancing and Auto-scaling

Let's talk about load balancing and auto-scaling in AWS.

2. Load balancing in AWS

An important concept in designing effective compute resources is load balancing. Load balancing evenly distributes traffic among multiple EC2 instances, preventing server overloads, and ensuring high availability and efficient horizontal scaling. AWS supports 4 load balancers: classic, network, application and gateway load balancers.

3. How does load balancing work?

Let's look at how load balancing works in real-time. The process starts with users sending processing requests.

4. How does load balancing work?

The requests hit the load balancer.

5. How does load balancing work?

The load balancer activates the primary group to fulfill the user requests.

6. How does load balancing work?

If the traffic exceeds the capacity of the primary target group, the load balancer activates the secondary group and distributes traffic evenly among all instances.

7. What is compute elasticity?

Elasticity is another important compute concept that ensures flexibility in systems by scaling up or down based on demand. EC2 instances achieve elasticity through EC2 Auto Scaling. So, what is EC2 Auto Scaling? Auto scaling is an AWS service that automatically adjusts the number of active instances based on real-time usage, which reduces costs and prevents over-provisioning.

8. How does auto-scaling work?

Now, let's look at how auto-scaling works. It starts with users sending a request.

9. How does auto-scaling work?

The requests are received by the EC2 auto-scaling service.

10. How does auto-scaling work?

The service starts routing requests to available active EC2 instances.

11. How does auto-scaling work?

If the demand exceeds the capacity of existing instances, the auto-scaling service starts creating new EC2 instances to service the increased demand.

12. How does auto-scaling work?

If the demand starts going down, it turns off the backup instances to save cost.

13. Load balancing vs. auto-scaling

Load balancing and auto-scaling sound like similar processes, so what's the difference between the two? The key difference is that load balancers can route traffic evenly across an existing set of EC2 instances, while auto-scaling has the ability to create new EC2 instances based on demand.

14. Let's practice!

Next up, let's test your understanding of optimizing compute resources.

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