Module 10: Automatic Scaling and Monitoring

AWS Academy Cloud Foundations

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Module overview
Topics Activities
• Elastic Load Balancing activity
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon CloudWatch activity
• Amazon CloudWatch

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Lab

• Scale and Load Balance Your Architecture

Knowledge check

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Module objectives
After completing this module, you should be able to:
• Indicate how to distribute traffic across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2) instances by using Elastic Load Balancing
• Identify how Amazon CloudWatch enables you to monitor AWS resources
and applications in real time
• Explain how Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling launches and releases servers in
response to workload changes
• Perform scaling and load balancing tasks to improve an architecture

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Section 1: Elastic Load Balancing
Module 10: Automatic Scaling and Monitoring

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Elastic Load Balancing

• Distributes incoming application

or network traffic across multiple
targets in a single Availability
Elastic Load
Zone or across multiple Balancing
Availability Zones.
• Scales your load balancer as
IP addresses
traffic to your application
Containers
changes over time. EC2 instances Lambda functions

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Types of load balancers

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 How Elastic Load Balancing works
• With Application Load
Balancers and Network Load
Balancers, you register
targets in target groups, and AWS Cloud
route traffic to the target Load balancer accepts
incoming traffic
groups. Availability Zone A
from clients.
Availability Zone B

• With Classic Load Balancers,

you register instances with
the load balancer. Listener checks for
Listener connection requests. Listener

Load balancer routes

Load balancer traffic only to
performs health ✓ . healthy targets. ✓ . ✓ . ✓ .
checks to monitor
health of registered
targets.
Target
X
Target Target Target Target

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Elastic Load Balancing use cases

Highly available and Containerized Elasticity

fault-tolerant applications and scalability
applications

Virtual private Hybrid environments Invoke Lambda

cloud (VPC) functions over HTTP(S)

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Activity: Elastic Load Balancing

You must support traffic to a containerized

application.

You have extremely spiky and unpredictable TCP

traffic.

You need simple load balancing with multiple

protocols.

You need to support a static or Elastic IP address, or

an IP target outside a VPC.

You need a load balancer that can handle millions of

requests per second while maintaining low latencies.

You must support HTTPS requests.

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Activity: Elastic Load Balancing Answers

You must support traffic to a containerized Application Load Balancer

application.

You have extremely spiky and unpredictable TCP Network Load Balancer
traffic.

You need simple load balancing with multiple Classic Load Balancer
protocols.

You need to support a static or Elastic IP address, or Network Load Balancer

an IP target outside a VPC.

You need a load balancer that can handle millions of Network Load Balancer
requests per second while maintaining low latencies.

You must support HTTPS requests. Application Load Balancer

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Load balancer monitoring

• Amazon CloudWatch metrics – Used to

verify that the system is performing as
expected and creates an alarm to
initiate an action if a metric goes
outside an acceptable range.
• Access logs – Capture detailed
information about requests sent to your
load balancer.
• AWS CloudTrail logs – Capture the who,
what, when, and where of API
interactions in AWS services.

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Section 1 key • Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming
application or network traffic across multiple
takeaways targets in one or more Availability Zones.
• Elastic Load Balancing supports three types of
load balancers:
• Application Load Balancer
• Network Load Balancer
• Classic Load Balancer
• ELB offers instance health checks, security, and
monitoring.

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Section 2: Amazon CloudWatch
Module 10: Automatic Scaling and Monitoring

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Monitoring AWS resources
To use AWS efficiently, you need insight into your AWS resources:

• How do you know when you should launch more Amazon EC2 instances?

• Is your application's performance or availability being affected by a lack of

sufficient capacity?

• How much of your infrastructure is actually being used?

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Amazon CloudWatch
• Monitors –
• AWS resources
• Applications that run on AWS
• Collects and tracks –
Amazon • Standard metrics
• Custom metrics
CloudWatch
• Alarms –
• Send notifications to an Amazon SNS topic
• Perform Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling or Amazon
EC2 actions
• Events –
• Define rules to match changes in AWS
environment and route these events to one or
more target functions or streams for
processing

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CloudWatch alarms
• Create alarms based on –
• Static threshold
• Anomaly detection
• Metric math expression
• Specify –
• Namespace
• Metric
• Statistic
• Period
• Conditions
• Additional configuration
• Actions

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 Activity: Amazon CloudWatch

If average CPU utilization is > 60% for 5

minutes…
Amazon EC2
If the number of simultaneous connections is >
10 for 1 minute…
Amazon RDS
If the maximum bucket size in bytes is around
3 for 1 day…
Amazon S3
If the number of healthy hosts is < 5 for 10
minutes…
Elastic Load Balancing
If the volume of read operations is > 1,000 for
10 seconds…
Amazon Elastic
Block Store
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 Activity: Amazon CloudWatch Answers

If average CPU utilization is > 60% for 5

Correct!
minutes…
Amazon EC2
If the number of simultaneous connections is >
Correct!
10 for 1 minute…
Amazon RDS
If the maximum bucket size in bytes is around Incorrect. Around is not a threshold option.
3 for 1 day… You must specify a threshold of >, >=, <=, or <.
Amazon S3
If the number of healthy hosts is < 5 for 10
Correct!
minutes…
Elastic Load Balancing
If the volume of read operations is > 1,000 for Incorrect. You must specify a statistic (for
10 seconds… example, average volume).
Amazon Elastic
Block Store
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Section 2 key • Amazon CloudWatch helps you monitor your
AWS resources—and the applications that you
takeaways run on AWS—in real time.
• CloudWatch enables you to –
• Collect and track standard and custom metrics.
• Set alarms to automatically send notifications to SNS
topics, or perform Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling or
Amazon EC2 actions.
• Define rules that match changes in your AWS
environment and route these events to targets for
processing.

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Section 3: Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Module 10: Automatic Scaling and Monitoring

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Why is scaling important?

Unused Over
capacity capacity

Su M T W Th F Sa Su M T W Th F Sa

Used capacity Provisioned capacity

(demand)

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Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
• Helps you maintain application
availability
• Enables you to automatically add or
remove EC2 instances according to
conditions that you define
• Detects impaired EC2 instances and
unhealthy applications, and replaces the
instances without your intervention
Su M T W Th F Sa • Provides several scaling options –
Manual, scheduled, dynamic or on-
Used capacity Provisioned capacity
demand, and predictive
(demand)

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Typical weekly traffic at Amazon.com

Provisioned capacity

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

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 November traffic to Amazon.com

Provisioned capacity 76 percent

The challenge is to efficiently guess the

unknown quantity of how much
compute capacity you need.

November
24 percent

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Auto Scaling groups

Auto Scaling group An Auto Scaling group is a

collection of EC2 instances that are
treated as a logical grouping for
the purposes of automatic scaling
and management.
Minimum size Launch or terminate
instances as needed

Desired capacity

Maximum size

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Scaling out versus scaling in

Elastic Load
Balancing

Auto Scaling group Auto Scaling group Auto Scaling group

Base configuration Scale out Scale in

(launch instances) (terminate instances)
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How Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling works

What Where When

VPC Maintain current number
Private subnet • Health checks
AMI

Auto Scaling group Manual scaling

EC2 instance • Min, max, desired capacity

Scheduled scaling
Launch configuration Auto Scaling group • Scheduled actions
• AMI • VPC and subnets
• Instance type • Load balancer Dynamic scaling
• IAM role • Scaling policies
• Security groups
• EBS volumes Predictive scaling
• AWS Auto Scaling
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Implementing dynamic scaling

Elastic Load Balancing

Auto Scaling group

CPU
utilization If average CPU
utilization is
> 60% for 5
minutes…

Run Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling policy

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Amazon CloudWatch

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AWS Auto Scaling
• Monitors your applications and automatically
adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable
performance at the lowest possible cost
• Provides a simple, powerful user interface that
AWS Auto Scaling enables you to build scaling plans for resources,
including –
• Amazon EC2 instances and Spot Fleets
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Tasks
• Amazon DynamoDB tables and indexes
• Amazon Aurora Replicas

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Section 3 key • Scaling enables you to respond quickly to changes in
resource needs.
takeaways • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling maintains application
availability by automatically adding or removing EC2
instances.
• An Auto Scaling group is a collection of EC2 instances.
• A launch configuration is an instance configuration
template.
• Dynamic scaling uses Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling,
CloudWatch, and Elastic Load Balancing.
• AWS Auto Scaling is a separate service from Amazon
EC2 Auto Scaling.

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 Lab 6:
Scale and Load
Balance Your
Architecture

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Lab 6: Scenario
AWS Cloud

Region
Availability Zone A Availability Zone B
VPC: 10.0.0.0/16 Internet Public subnet 2:
Public subnet 1: gateway 10.0.2.0/24
10.0.0.0/24
Security group

NAT gateway
Web Server 1

Private subnet 1: Private subnet 2:

10.0.1.0/24 10.0.3.0/24
Security group Security group

RDS DB Primary RDS DB Secondary

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Lab 6: Tasks
• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from a running instance.
• Create an Application Load Balancer.
• Create a launch configuration and an Auto Scaling group.
• Automatically scale new instances within a private subnet.
• Create Amazon CloudWatch alarms and monitor performance of your
infrastructure.

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Lab 6: Final product
AWS Cloud
Region Availability Zone A Availability Zone B
VPC: 10.0.0.0/16 Internet
Public subnet 1: gateway Public subnet 2:
10.0.0.0/24 10.0.2.0/24
Security group

NAT gateway
Application
Private subnet 1: Load Balancer Private subnet 2:
10.0.1.0/24 10.0.3.0/24

Security group Security group

Web Auto Scaling Web
Instance group Instance

Security group Security group

RDS DB RDS DB
Primary Secondary

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~ 30 minutes

Begin Lab 6: Scale and

Load Balance Your
Architecture

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 Lab debrief:
Key takeaways

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Module wrap-up
Module 10: Automatic Scaling and Monitoring

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Module summary
In summary, in this module you learned how to:
• Indicate how to distribute traffic across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2) instances using Elastic Load Balancing.
• Identify how Amazon CloudWatch enables you to monitor AWS resources
and applications in real time.
• Explain how Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling launches and releases servers in
response to workload changes.
• Perform scaling and load balancing tasks to improve an architecture.

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Complete the knowledge check

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 Sample exam question
Which service would you use to send alerts based on Amazon CloudWatch alarms?

Choice Response

A Amazon Simple Notification Service

B AWS CloudTrail

C AWS Trusted Advisor

D Amazon Route 53

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Sample exam question answer
Which service would you use to send alerts based on Amazon CloudWatch alarms?

The correct answer is A.

The keywords in the question are “send alerts” and “Amazon CloudWatch alarms”.

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 Thank you

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