Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Auto Scale on a Schedule

by
Jeremy Canfield |
Updated: May 12 2024
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) articles
An Auto Scaling Group let's you automatically start and stop EC2 instances based on some condition, such as creating and starting up EC2 instances when requests load is high or stopping and terminating EC2 instances when requests load is low.
This is often used in conjunction with:
- CloudWatch Alarms, where the Alarm checks some condition such as requests load or CPU Utilization and then invokes the Auto Scaling Group to create/startup EC2 instances or to stop/terminate EC2 instances. For example, you may have an Auto Scaling Group that has minimum 1 and maximum 3, meaning that the Auto Scaling Group will have 1 EC2 instance when load is low and scale up to 3 EC2 instances when load is high.
- Scheduled Auto Scale (this article) - To create/startup EC2 instances or to stop/terminate EC2 instances on a predefined scheduled, such as hourly, daily, weekly, or some predefined datetime
In the AWS EC2 console, at Auto Scaling Group > Automatic Scaling > Scheduled action, you can create a schedule to invoke the Auto Scaling Group to Auto Scale via a cron table, a predefined reoccurrence, or once at a certain date and time.
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