Why Should Companies Consider Auto-Scaling or Cloud-Busting

Auto-scaling or cloud bursting is often easy to handle, though you may have some questions… namely, why and how to go about migrating chosen applications. Before you proceed,  you would like to know: Is it really worth it? Are there any risks?

Why are organization's opting for auto-scaling?

The major benefit of auto-scaling is to control hardware expenses by shrinking/expanding your application infrastructure to meet on-demand. The cost savings are understood by having the advantage of a cloud utility-based pricing model where you only pay for the resources you use. 

This is in contrast to the primitive approach of hardware deployment on-premise to meet the peak real-time usage, which leads to utilizing resources and a lower return on investment.

Another added benefit of auto-scaling is to ensure your applications are available all the time or, to achieve application resilience. With this approach, you make-up a solution that can easily identify failing server instances and replace them automatically with healthy instances in a way that is seamless to the application.

Methods for achieving the auto-scaling

There are two main procedures for implementing an auto-scaling solution. 

The option you choose depends on a number of factors, including the tools available as well as your development teams’ competence to effectively use those tools. The first method is known as bootstrapping. Under this method, the server instances are dynamically configured as it is booting up. For example, if an application needs another web server, the server will download the necessary software, install, and configure itself accordingly as a web server during the boot process. This can create quite a bit of complexity, as it needs a set of third-party tools to provide the automation functions.

The second method of implementing the process is to have some pre-configured virtual machines that can be powered-on and added into your environment when required. Let’s say, for having a three-tiered application architecture that includes web, app, and database tiers, you will have the additional web, app, and database servers in a powered-off state ready to be powered on when needed.

Beware of any vendor lock-in

Nowadays, many cloud providers have developed their own potential for auto-scaling or cloud bursting on their cloud platform. This can include the use of custom APIs but are relevant to that cloud provider only. If you spend all your time in developing a scaling solution that works only against a specific cloud provider’s APIs, it makes no sense to migrate applications to another cloud platform without having to fully redesign an auto-scaling solution. There are a number of

industry-standard tools for scaling available and are cloud vendor agnostic. Consider using these tools only to keep the scaling solution portable and avoid any vendor lock-in.

Analyzing the Cost benefits

Finally, before you make auto-scaling a necessity for your application, it is always important to compare the cost of implementing such a solution versus the savings you expect to gain. There are some costs to consider when implementing an auto-scaling solution, which includes the development effort, software licenses, and software maintenance, as well as the ongoing maintenance of the solution to stay current with the various changes in an application. Moreover, you should also consider the amount of effort required to integrate an auto-scaling solution along with your application. There are some modern applications, which are designed to be loosely coupled to facilitate the auto-scaling process. This can help in reducing the development time and hence the costs required to get the solution is implemented. So, traditional applications that were not designed to be dynamically re-configured would require more development effort and, in many cases, may not be worth the investment to get this solution implemented. Once you get to know the total cost of implementing an auto-scaling solution, you then need to compare it to the savings you expect to gain and determine if that cost makes any financial sense.

Rising by the challenge  

Like many challenges, you face while selecting the best application that could satisfy your current and future business needs. Simply couple that decision with an interest to select the best cloud “IaaS” provider to host your application and the decision becomes so daunting! However, understanding the benefits of auto-scaling, its key considerations, and how to perform a cost/benefit investigation will equip you to select the best IaaS provider to fulfill all on-demand needs. At Infiflex, our team of cloud solution architects can help in assisting you to make the right choice.