Cloudware Vendor Solutions - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 330

16.1.1.6 CloudWatch
CloudWatch is a monitoring infrastructure used by application developers,
users, and system administrators to collect and track metrics important for
optimizing the performance of applications and for increasing the efficiency
of resource utilization. Without installing any software, a user can monitor
approximately a dozen preselected metrics and then view graphs and statis-
tics for these metrics.
When launching an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), a user can start the
CloudWatch and specify the type of monitoring. Basic Monitoring is free
of charge and collects data at 5 min intervals for up to 10 metrics; Detailed
Monitoring is subject to a charge and collects data at 1 min intervals. This
service can also be used to monitor the latency of access to EBS volumes, the
available storage space for RDS DB instances, the number of messages in
SQS, and other parameters of interest for applications.
16.1.1.7 Auto Scaling
Auto Scaling exploits cloud elasticity and provides automatic scaling of EC2
instances. The service supports grouping of instances, monitoring of the
instances in a group, and defining triggers and pairs of CloudWatch alarms
and policies, which allow the size of the group to be scaled up or down. Typically,
a maximum, a minimum, and a regular size for the group are specified.
An Auto Scaling group consists of a set of instances described in a static
fashion by launch configurations. When the group scales up, new instances
are started using the parameters for the RunInstances EC2 call provided by
the launch configuration. When the group scales down, the instances with
older launch configurations are terminated first. The monitoring function
of the Auto Scaling service carries out health checks to enforce the speci-
fied policies; for example, a user may specify a health check for Elastic Load
Balancing, and then Auto Scaling will terminate an instance exhibiting a low
performance and start a new one. Triggers use CloudWatch alarms to detect
events and then initiate specific actions; for example, a trigger could detect
when the CPU utilization of the instances in the group goes above 90% and
then scale up the group by starting new instances. Typically, triggers to scale
up and down are specified for a group.
16.1.1.8 Elastic Beanstalk
Elastic Beanstalk, a service that interacts with other AWS services, including
EC2, S3, SNS, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling, automatically han-
dles the deployment, capacity provisioning, load balancing, Auto Scaling,
and application monitoring functions [356]. The service automatically scales
the resources as required by the application, either up or down, based on the
default Auto Scaling settings.