Deploying in the Amazon cloud is touted as a great way to achieve high scalability while paying only for the computing power you use. How do you get the best scalability from the technology?
1. Use Auto-scaling
Auto-scaling is a unique feature of cloud computing and Amazon's EC2 offering. Setup a load balancer and a couple of webservers for your application as you normally would. Design your webserver based on a template AMI that you'll reuse over and over. Then setup auto-scaling and set thresholds based on the traffic you forecast. When a threshold is passed, AWS will spinup a new instance of your webserver, and roll it into the load balancer pool automatically. Once traffic falls below the scale back threshold, Amazon will take a server out of the pool for you.
Be sure to monitor this …
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