AWS auto scaling best practices are highlighted when high traffic events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are on the horizon. Online shopping during the four-day window has become an international phenomenon, with traffic increasing by 20 to 25 percent each year. You want to make sure your e-commerce site is ready for this surge and for unexpected spikes in demand as well.
The ability to scale based on demand is one of the chief reasons businesses move their infrastructures to the cloud. AWS offers plenty of best practices for building scalability into your infrastructure: vertical scalability (moving to higher-capacity instances) and horizontal scalability (adding more instances) to respond to traffic surges.
Follow These 7 AWS Auto Scaling Best Practices to make sure your site is ready for anything
Best practices of preparing for events like Black Friday start with automating and scaling as much as possible. But they don’t stop there. Preparing for mega surges in traffic is about more than turning on a few switches.
The following AWS auto scaling best practices and tools should be used:
- Measure everything with CloudWatch. You’ll want to be monitoring performance of all critical assets during high traffic events. Set alarms and notifications for key performance metrics conservatively, so that the right person will be alerted, or the right action automated, sooner rather than later.
- Use Auto Scaling. Put the resources that are going to be needed in an Auto Scaling group. Groups allow you to treat multiple instances as a single object to scale specific instance types with specific resources together. Auto Scaling performs regular health checks on EC2 instances and will automatically replace instances that fail the health check. Auto Scaling also supports the PCI-compliant processing, storage, and transmission of credit card data.
- Leverage Elastic Load Balancing. This can be used to automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple instances in your Auto Scaling group. Elastic Load Balancing can also be used to balance traffic across multiple regions and Availability Zones.
- Use Route 53 to scale your DNS. If you use Amazon Route 53 to route DNS queries to your load balancer, you can also use Route 53 to configure DNS failover for your load balancer. In this configuration, Amazon Route 53 checks the health of the registered EC2 instances for the load balancer to determine whether they are available, and routes them the most available resource.
- Improve performance with AWS ElastiCache. This improves the performance of your applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory data stores, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed nodes, and reduces the risk of overloaded databases, which slow website and application load times.
- Test, test and test some more. Use historical metrics to help forecast and model future traffic, and to estimate your resource needs accordingly. Create scripts that mimic forecasted behavior and test against them. Hold surprise drills that force the team to react to problems when they don’t expect them. AWS also offers vulnerability and penetration testing for qualifying businesses.
- Think like a customer. Remember, scaling for huge shopping events isn’t just about keeping your network up and running. It’s about delivering a great shopping experience for your customers. If your network is too slow or is unavailable you might lose more than a shopping cart.
Black Friday is one of many events which can cause spikes in traffic. It’s important to be prepared for these events year round, not just when they’re expected. You can train your teams to be prepared to use these tools and best practices with short notice in the event of some unplanned surge so that you can handle it.
Need Help Preparing for Black Friday with Auto Scaling?
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