The load on the services tier of enterprise system is typically nonlinear. Matching the infrastructure services to the workload is a key challenge faced by operation teams these days. The complexity starts with understanding the pattern around increase/decrease in the workload, mapping the workload with a scale-out / scale-up plan and then executing the plan manually. The challenges multiply if the workload keeps changing frequently altering the scalability requirements dynamically.
The following diagram illustrates a scenario where the operations team manually manages the scaling of services:
Auto-scaling (Problem)
The solution is to employ a software system to perform scaling automatically based on parameters such as number of requests, CPU utilization, memory utilization, and buffer size (queue size), and so on to improve the efficiency of the system and to optimize operational expense.
Auto-scaling is an elastic process which will provision resources based on...