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I am working with amazon web services and right now have a simple micro instance set up for my development environment.

I want to add a load balancer in addition to auto scaling to dynamically increase the amount of instances or the power of an instance when I need it.

Right now I have my domain pointing to my micro instance. Should I change this and have it somehow point to my load balancer and then have my load balancer add instance when the micro instance is under high load?

If anyone knows a good tutorial with examples that would really help too. Amazons documentation is somewhat lacking and out of date.

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1 Answer 1

I haven't done this yet but this is how I believe it's supposed to work.

You create an Elastic IP Address and point your domain to that. You then configure the load balancer on that IP address and then add your instance to the load balancer.

When the auto scaling decides to add an instance then you need to make sure that instance gets added to the load balancer.

Note that you also need to make sure that your server design allows any instance to handle the request.

Frankly, I suggest you think about scaling by getting a bigger instance to start with. It's much easier to get things started that way and it will probably take a while before your app actually needs to auto-scale.

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I think this is the correct process to. I will let you know if I get it working. –  Navetz Dec 27 '10 at 20:54
Scaling up vs out depends on your traffic patterns. If you get spiky traffic loads then it is cheaper to run smaller instances and then add instances only when there are spikes in load. –  Ken Liu Feb 20 '12 at 17:58

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