PilotLight AutoScaling EC2 Instances in AWS


This demo will provide a walkthrough of a solution that incorporates Pilot Light Autoscaling servers in AWS. Utilizing native AWS constructs and a custom Lambda script, we can scale servers up and down in a similar method to AWS's native AutoScaling while allows servers to be available offline and powered on and off when required.

AWS EC2 Auto Scaling allows you to select an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) and create what is known as a Launch Configuration (or Launch Template). From this launch configuration and/or template, new instances are added and removed dynamically based on various metrics.

When a new instance is created due to scale out, it causes a new instance to be launched from the base AMI selected during the Launch Configuration or Launch Template creation. This AMI might have a bootstrap user data script installed; it could be a custom AMI with many components of an application built into the image; or it could use a Configuration Management tool like Puppet to auto-configure the server at boot.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a great solution path for a large majority of workloads. But it can become challenging for developers and cloud teams when you introduce enterprise requirements for server builds and/or additional setup complexities. 

In this demo, we will demonstrate a solution that allows customers to create instances, configure them, and allow them to be ready in standby, rather than created and destroyed.  This allows customers with strict governance policies and/or complex application dependencies that may not be capable of utilizing native AWS AutoScaling easily to still realize the benefit and power of cloud elasticity with their cloud compute infrastructure.