Load Balancing and Auto-scaling

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Alex Kuntz

Head of Cloud Curriculum, DataCamp

Load balancing in AWS

Load balancing ensures even distribution of incoming traffic among multiple EC2 instances, preventing overload on a single server

Ensures high availability
Provides horizontal scaling

Types of load balancers in AWS

Four icons showing classic, network, application, and gateway load balancers.

How does load balancing work?

Users send requests

An architecture diagram highlighting user requests sent to a load balancer.

How does load balancing work?

Users send requests
Requests hit the load balancer

An architecture diagram highlighting user requests sent to a load balancer.

How does load balancing work?

Users send requests
Requests hit the load balancer
Primary target group is instantiated by the application load balancer first

An architecture diagram highlighting a user request move from a load balance to primary EC2 instances.

How does load balancing work?

Users send requests
Requests hit the load balancer
Primary target group is instantiated by the application load balancer first
If demand increases, the load balancer activates the secondary target group and distributes the load across all instances

An architecture diagram highlighting a user request move from a load balance to primary and secondary EC2 instances.

What is compute elasticity?

Elasticity ensures your system can scale up or down based on demand, providing flexibility in resource allocation

EC2 instances achieve elasticity through EC2 Auto Scaling

What is EC2 Auto Scaling?

Automatically adjust the number of active instances based on usage and requirement
Optimize costs
Prevent over-provisioning

How does auto-scaling work?

Users send requests

An architecture diagram showing a user request generation.

How does auto-scaling work?

Users send requests
The requests are routed to EC2 Auto Scaling service

An architecture diagram showing a user request hitting an EC2 Auto Scaling service.

How does auto-scaling work?

Users send requests
The requests are routed to EC2 Auto Scaling service
The service then routes requests to the active EC2 instances

An architecture diagram showing a user request hitting an EC2 Auto Scaling service and getting divided to EC2 instances.

How does auto-scaling work?

Users send requests
The requests are routed to EC2 Auto Scaling service
The service then routes requests to the active EC2 instances
If demand increases, it starts adding new EC2 instances to manage the additional load

An architecture diagram showing multiple user requests hitting an EC2 Auto Scaling service and getting divided to active and backup EC2 instances.

How does auto-scaling work?

Users send requests
The requests are routed to EC2 Auto Scaling service
The service then routes requests to the active EC2 instances
If demand increases, it starts adding new EC2 instances to manage the additional load
As demand goes down, the newly added EC2 instances are shut down

An architecture diagram showing a user request hitting an EC2 Auto Scaling service and getting divided to EC2 instances.

Load balancing vs. auto-scaling

Load balancing

Route traffic evenly
Utilize existing EC2 instances

An icon showing AWS Load Balancer.

Auto-scaling

Ensure demand is always met
Ability to add/remove EC2 instances

An icon showing EC2 Auto Scaling.

Let's practice!

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts