New EC2 Services: Monitor, Scale and Load Balance Your Instances

2009-05-20

Amazon recently released three major new features for their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service -- New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch. These beta services are immediately available to anyone with an EC2 account and server instances located in the US (sorry EU folks, they are US-only for now).

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that records resource and performance metrics for any EC2 instances you associate with the service, at a cost of 1.5¢ per monitored instance per hour. In addition to providing up to 2 weeks of monitoring data to EC2 users, this service also underpins the other two new EC2 services.

Auto Scaling is a service that will automatically start or stop EC2 instances on your behalf based on conditions you specify. In other words, this service allows you to automatically scale the computing power available to your application in response to changing demand.

You control your instance pool by defining triggers that react to defined conditions such as CPU load, response latency, and the number of healthy/unhealthy instances. Auto Scaling relies on CloudWatch to supply the metrics it needs to make scaling decisions, so every instance managed or started by the scaling service must be registered with CloudWatch. Happily, there is no additional cost for using Auto Scaling beyond the CloudWatch fees.

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) rounds out the new services by providing the ability to distribute network traffic between multiple EC2 instances. ELB routes traffic at the HTTP or TCP level to instances within or across Availability Zones, and avoids routing traffic to instances that have become unresponsive. The fee for ELB is 2.5¢ per hour for each load balancer, plus 0.8¢ per Gigabyte of data transferred through the service. You will also need to pay the CloudWatch fee for each load-balanced instance.

These features constitute a major step forward in EC2 functionality that will make it easier for many users to run applications reliably in the cloud without the need to implement their own management services. However, it is important to recognize that the services are only a first step and there are many situations where they will not provide the control, precision or cost-effectiveness you will need.

Some gotchas for the services in their current incarnation include:

As RightScale's Thorsten von Eicken points out in his discussion of the new services, there is still room in Amazon's ecosystem for third-party companies to offer value-adding services that improve on the underlying provider's offering in terms of functionality, flexibility, price and ease of use. As Amazon extends the capabilities of EC2 these companies will need to work harder to add value. This situation may be tough for them, but the fierce competition will ultimately benefit customers and accelerate the adoption of cloud services in general.

To help you get started with the new services there is a post in the EC2 forums that succinctly lists the documentation and resources you will need.

Tags: AWS Cloud Computing

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