Auto Scaling Microservices on ECS

A guide to using Application Auto Scaling with the Elastic Container Service and CloudFormation

This article covers the topic of auto-scaling ECS services and serves as a follow-up to my previous article about deploying microservices on the ECS Fargate platform. In order to help you get started, a GitHub repository has been set up to accompany this article — it includes a sample web service as well as a CloudFormation stack for provisioning the underlying infrastructure. This guide starts off by covering the concept of auto-scaling and how it is implemented as a service in AWS, we then review the sample web service before bringing the concepts together in a working deployment. Basic AWS and ECS knowledge by the reader is recommended. If you’re new to AWS, please remember that some resources may incur charges, therefore ensure you have a billing alarm set up.

Application Auto Scaling

Arguably, one of the biggest advantages of migrating application workload to the cloud is the promise of paying only for the resources an application truly needs. This, coupled with the ability to automatically scale an application’s underlying resources allows teams to avoid under- or over-provisioning infrastructure. In this way, teams are not only avoiding over-paying for unnecessary resources but also ensuring their applications have the required capacity needed to handle virtually any workload.