Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Construct Library
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This module is part of the AWS Cloud Development Kit project.
Auto Scaling Group
An AutoScalingGroup
represents a number of instances on which you run your code. You
pick the size of the fleet, the instance type and the OS image:
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType: ec2.InstanceType.of(ec2.InstanceClass.BURSTABLE2, ec2.InstanceSize.MICRO),
machineImage: new ec2.AmazonLinuxImage()
});
NOTE: AutoScalingGroup has an property called allowAllOutbound
(allowing the instances to contact the
internet) which is set to true
by default. Be sure to set this to false
if you don't want
your instances to be able to start arbitrary connections. Alternatively, you can specify an existing security
group to attach to the instances that are launched, rather than have the group create a new one.
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
const mySecurityGroup = new ec2.SecurityGroup(this, 'SecurityGroup', { vpc });
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType: ec2.InstanceType.of(ec2.InstanceClass.BURSTABLE2, ec2.InstanceSize.MICRO),
machineImage: new ec2.AmazonLinuxImage(),
securityGroup: mySecurityGroup,
});
Alternatively you can create an AutoScalingGroup
from a LaunchTemplate
:
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
declare const launchTemplate: ec2.LaunchTemplate;
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
launchTemplate: launchTemplate
});
To launch a mixture of Spot and on-demand instances, and/or with multiple instance types, you can create an AutoScalingGroup
from a MixedInstancesPolicy:
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
declare const launchTemplate1: ec2.LaunchTemplate;
declare const launchTemplate2: ec2.LaunchTemplate;
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
mixedInstancesPolicy: {
instancesDistribution: {
onDemandPercentageAboveBaseCapacity: 50,
},
launchTemplate: launchTemplate1,
launchTemplateOverrides: [
{ instanceType: new ec2.InstanceType('t3.micro') },
{ instanceType: new ec2.InstanceType('t3a.micro') },
{ instanceType: new ec2.InstanceType('t4g.micro'), launchTemplate: launchTemplate2 },
],
}
});
Machine Images (AMIs)
AMIs control the OS that gets launched when you start your EC2 instance. The EC2
library contains constructs to select the AMI you want to use.
Depending on the type of AMI, you select it a different way.
The latest version of Amazon Linux and Microsoft Windows images are
selectable by instantiating one of these classes:
example of creating images
NOTE: The Amazon Linux images selected will be cached in your cdk.json
, so that your
AutoScalingGroups don't automatically change out from under you when you're making unrelated
changes. To update to the latest version of Amazon Linux, remove the cache entry from the context
section of your cdk.json
.
We will add command-line options to make this step easier in the future.
AutoScaling Instance Counts
AutoScalingGroups make it possible to raise and lower the number of instances in the group,
in response to (or in advance of) changes in workload.
When you create your AutoScalingGroup, you specify a minCapacity
and a
maxCapacity
. AutoScaling policies that respond to metrics will never go higher
or lower than the indicated capacity (but scheduled scaling actions might, see
below).
There are three ways to scale your capacity:
- In response to a metric (also known as step scaling); for example, you
might want to scale out if the CPU usage across your cluster starts to rise,
and scale in when it drops again.
- By trying to keep a certain metric around a given value (also known as
target tracking scaling); you might want to automatically scale out and in to
keep your CPU usage around 50%.
- On a schedule; you might want to organize your scaling around traffic
flows you expect, by scaling out in the morning and scaling in in the
evening.
The general pattern of autoscaling will look like this:
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
declare const instanceType: ec2.InstanceType;
declare const machineImage: ec2.IMachineImage;
const autoScalingGroup = new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType,
machineImage,
minCapacity: 5,
maxCapacity: 100
});
Step Scaling
This type of scaling scales in and out in deterministics steps that you
configure, in response to metric values. For example, your scaling strategy to
scale in response to a metric that represents your average worker pool usage
might look like this:
Scaling -1 (no change) +1 +3
│ │ │ │ │
├────────┼───────────────────────┼────────┼────────┤
│ │ │ │ │
Worker use 0% 10% 50% 70% 100%
(Note that this is not necessarily a recommended scaling strategy, but it's
a possible one. You will have to determine what thresholds are right for you).
Note that in order to set up this scaling strategy, you will have to emit a
metric representing your worker utilization from your instances. After that,
you would configure the scaling something like this:
declare const autoScalingGroup: autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup;
const workerUtilizationMetric = new cloudwatch.Metric({
namespace: 'MyService',
metricName: 'WorkerUtilization'
});
autoScalingGroup.scaleOnMetric('ScaleToCPU', {
metric: workerUtilizationMetric,
scalingSteps: [
{ upper: 10, change: -1 },
{ lower: 50, change: +1 },
{ lower: 70, change: +3 },
],
adjustmentType: autoscaling.AdjustmentType.CHANGE_IN_CAPACITY,
});
The AutoScaling construct library will create the required CloudWatch alarms and
AutoScaling policies for you.
Target Tracking Scaling
This type of scaling scales in and out in order to keep a metric around a value
you prefer. There are four types of predefined metrics you can track, or you can
choose to track a custom metric. If you do choose to track a custom metric,
be aware that the metric has to represent instance utilization in some way
(AutoScaling will scale out if the metric is higher than the target, and scale
in if the metric is lower than the target).
If you configure multiple target tracking policies, AutoScaling will use the
one that yields the highest capacity.
The following example scales to keep the CPU usage of your instances around
50% utilization:
declare const autoScalingGroup: autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup;
autoScalingGroup.scaleOnCpuUtilization('KeepSpareCPU', {
targetUtilizationPercent: 50
});
To scale on average network traffic in and out of your instances:
declare const autoScalingGroup: autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup;
autoScalingGroup.scaleOnIncomingBytes('LimitIngressPerInstance', {
targetBytesPerSecond: 10 * 1024 * 1024
});
autoScalingGroup.scaleOnOutgoingBytes('LimitEgressPerInstance', {
targetBytesPerSecond: 10 * 1024 * 1024
});
To scale on the average request count per instance (only works for
AutoScalingGroups that have been attached to Application Load
Balancers):
declare const autoScalingGroup: autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup;
autoScalingGroup.scaleOnRequestCount('LimitRPS', {
targetRequestsPerSecond: 1000
});
Scheduled Scaling
This type of scaling is used to change capacities based on time. It works by
changing minCapacity
, maxCapacity
and desiredCapacity
of the
AutoScalingGroup, and so can be used for two purposes:
- Scale in and out on a schedule by setting the
minCapacity
high or
the maxCapacity
low. - Still allow the regular scaling actions to do their job, but restrict
the range they can scale over (by setting both
minCapacity
and
maxCapacity
but changing their range over time).
A schedule is expressed as a cron expression. The Schedule
class has a cron
method to help build cron expressions.
The following example scales the fleet out in the morning, going back to natural
scaling (all the way down to 1 instance if necessary) at night:
declare const autoScalingGroup: autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup;
autoScalingGroup.scaleOnSchedule('PrescaleInTheMorning', {
schedule: autoscaling.Schedule.cron({ hour: '8', minute: '0' }),
minCapacity: 20,
});
autoScalingGroup.scaleOnSchedule('AllowDownscalingAtNight', {
schedule: autoscaling.Schedule.cron({ hour: '20', minute: '0' }),
minCapacity: 1
});
Configuring Instances using CloudFormation Init
It is possible to use the CloudFormation Init mechanism to configure the
instances in the AutoScalingGroup. You can write files to it, run commands,
start services, etc. See the documentation of
AWS::CloudFormation::Init
and the documentation of CDK's aws-ec2
library for more information.
When you specify a CloudFormation Init configuration for an AutoScalingGroup:
- you must also specify
signals
to configure how long CloudFormation
should wait for the instances to successfully configure themselves. - you should also specify an
updatePolicy
to configure how instances
should be updated when the AutoScalingGroup is updated (for example,
when the AMI is updated). If you don't specify an update policy, a rolling
update is chosen by default.
Here's an example of using CloudFormation Init to write a file to the
instance hosts on startup:
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
declare const instanceType: ec2.InstanceType;
declare const machineImage: ec2.IMachineImage;
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType,
machineImage,
init: ec2.CloudFormationInit.fromElements(
ec2.InitFile.fromString('/etc/my_instance', 'This got written during instance startup'),
),
signals: autoscaling.Signals.waitForAll({
timeout: Duration.minutes(10),
}),
});
Signals
In normal operation, CloudFormation will send a Create or Update command to
an AutoScalingGroup and proceed with the rest of the deployment without waiting
for the instances in the AutoScalingGroup.
Configure signals
to tell CloudFormation to wait for a specific number of
instances in the AutoScalingGroup to have been started (or failed to start)
before moving on. An instance is supposed to execute the
cfn-signal
program as part of its startup to indicate whether it was started
successfully or not.
If you use CloudFormation Init support (described in the previous section),
the appropriate call to cfn-signal
is automatically added to the
AutoScalingGroup's UserData. If you don't use the signals
directly, you are
responsible for adding such a call yourself.
The following type of Signals
are available:
Signals.waitForAll([options])
: wait for all of desiredCapacity
amount of instances
to have started (recommended).Signals.waitForMinCapacity([options])
: wait for a minCapacity
amount of instances
to have started (use this if waiting for all instances takes too long and you are happy
with a minimum count of healthy hosts).Signals.waitForCount(count, [options])
: wait for a specific amount of instances to have
started.
There are two options
you can configure:
timeout
: maximum time a host startup is allowed to take. If a host does not report
success within this time, it is considered a failure. Default is 5 minutes.minSuccessPercentage
: percentage of hosts that needs to be healthy in order for the
update to succeed. If you set this value lower than 100, some percentage of hosts may
report failure, while still considering the deployment a success. Default is 100%.
Update Policy
The update policy describes what should happen to running instances when the definition
of the AutoScalingGroup is changed. For example, if you add a command to the UserData
of an AutoScalingGroup, do the existing instances get replaced with new instances that
have executed the new UserData? Or do the "old" instances just keep on running?
It is recommended to always use an update policy, otherwise the current state of your
instances also depends the previous state of your instances, rather than just on your
source code. This degrades the reproducibility of your deployments.
The following update policies are available:
UpdatePolicy.none()
: leave existing instances alone (not recommended).UpdatePolicy.rollingUpdate([options])
: progressively replace the existing
instances with new instances, in small batches. At any point in time,
roughly the same amount of total instances will be running. If the deployment
needs to be rolled back, the fresh instances will be replaced with the "old"
configuration again.UpdatePolicy.replacingUpdate([options])
: build a completely fresh copy
of the new AutoScalingGroup next to the old one. Once the AutoScalingGroup
has been successfully created (and the instances started, if signals
is
configured on the AutoScalingGroup), the old AutoScalingGroup is deleted.
If the deployment needs to be rolled back, the new AutoScalingGroup is
deleted and the old one is left unchanged.
Allowing Connections
See the documentation of the @aws-cdk/aws-ec2
package for more information
about allowing connections between resources backed by instances.
Max Instance Lifetime
To enable the max instance lifetime support, specify maxInstanceLifetime
property
for the AutoscalingGroup
resource. The value must be between 7 and 365 days(inclusive).
To clear a previously set value, leave this property undefined.
Instance Monitoring
To disable detailed instance monitoring, specify instanceMonitoring
property
for the AutoscalingGroup
resource as Monitoring.BASIC
. Otherwise detailed monitoring
will be enabled.
Monitoring Group Metrics
Group metrics are used to monitor group level properties; they describe the group rather than any of its instances (e.g GroupMaxSize, the group maximum size). To enable group metrics monitoring, use the groupMetrics
property.
All group metrics are reported in a granularity of 1 minute at no additional charge.
See EC2 docs for a list of all available group metrics.
To enable group metrics monitoring using the groupMetrics
property:
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
declare const instanceType: ec2.InstanceType;
declare const machineImage: ec2.IMachineImage;
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType,
machineImage,
groupMetrics: [autoscaling.GroupMetrics.all()],
});
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType,
machineImage,
groupMetrics: [new autoscaling.GroupMetrics(autoscaling.GroupMetric.MIN_SIZE, autoscaling.GroupMetric.MAX_SIZE)],
});
Termination policies
Auto Scaling uses termination policies
to determine which instances it terminates first during scale-in events. You
can specify one or more termination policies with the terminationPolicies
property:
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
declare const instanceType: ec2.InstanceType;
declare const machineImage: ec2.IMachineImage;
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType,
machineImage,
terminationPolicies: [
autoscaling.TerminationPolicy.OLDEST_INSTANCE,
autoscaling.TerminationPolicy.DEFAULT,
],
});
Protecting new instances from being terminated on scale-in
By default, Auto Scaling can terminate an instance at any time after launch when
scaling in an Auto Scaling Group, subject to the group's termination
policy.
However, you may wish to protect newly-launched instances from being scaled in
if they are going to run critical applications that should not be prematurely
terminated. EC2 Capacity Providers for Amazon ECS requires this attribute be
set to true
.
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
declare const instanceType: ec2.InstanceType;
declare const machineImage: ec2.IMachineImage;
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType,
machineImage,
newInstancesProtectedFromScaleIn: true,
});
Configuring Instance Metadata Service (IMDS)
Toggling IMDSv1
You can configure EC2 Instance Metadata Service options to either
allow both IMDSv1 and IMDSv2 or enforce IMDSv2 when interacting with the IMDS.
To do this for a single AutoScalingGroup
, you can use set the requireImdsv2
property.
The example below demonstrates IMDSv2 being required on a single AutoScalingGroup
:
declare const vpc: ec2.Vpc;
declare const instanceType: ec2.InstanceType;
declare const machineImage: ec2.IMachineImage;
new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup(this, 'ASG', {
vpc,
instanceType,
machineImage,
requireImdsv2: true,
});
You can also use AutoScalingGroupRequireImdsv2Aspect
to apply the operation to multiple AutoScalingGroups.
The example below demonstrates the AutoScalingGroupRequireImdsv2Aspect
being used to require IMDSv2 for all AutoScalingGroups in a stack:
const aspect = new autoscaling.AutoScalingGroupRequireImdsv2Aspect();
Aspects.of(this).add(aspect);
Warm Pool
Auto Scaling offers a warm pool which gives an ability to decrease latency for applications that have exceptionally long boot times. You can create a warm pool with default parameters as below:
declare const autoScalingGroup: autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup;
autoScalingGroup.addWarmPool();
You can also customize a warm pool by configuring parameters:
declare const autoScalingGroup: autoscaling.AutoScalingGroup;
autoScalingGroup.addWarmPool({
minSize: 1,
reuseOnScaleIn: true,
});
Future work