Amazon Web Services Inc. is making it easier for its customers to optimize applications running on its infrastructure with a new service launched Tuesday called AWS Auto Scaling.

Amazon users will be aware that the company has already offered automatic scaling services for some time already, but up until now these have been for specific cloud services such as its EC2 computing service, DynamoDB and Aurora databases and others.

With AWS Auto Scaling, however, the company is bringing automatic scaling to multiple services via a single user interface for added convenience. “It operates on any desired EC2 Auto Scaling groups, EC2 Spot Fleets, ECS tasks, DynamoDB tables, DynamoDB Global Secondary Indexes, and Aurora Replicas that are part of your application, as described by an AWS CloudFormation stack or in AWS Elastic Beanstalk,” Amazon’s chief evangelist Jeff Barr explained in a blog post.

The gist of the announcement is that it’s easier to control resource usage. Previously, users needed to set up alarms or scaling actions for each individual service and resource, which could be quite time-consuming. Now, all they need to do is point AWS Auto Scaling to the application they desire, then select the services and resources they wish to control, and set the performance parameters they require.

AWS Auto Scaling then takes care of the rest, increasing the capacity of constrained resources during demand spikes to ensure the application delivers the expected performance. When demand tails off, AWS Auto Scaling reduces the capacity of those resources so customers can keep their costs to a minimum.

“By automating how applications respond to changing demand, customers can focus on building and deploying new apps instead of monitoring existing ones,” Barr said.

Users will also appreciate the ability to “trade off” when choosing thresholds for scaling, Barr said. For example, a user might want to optimize AWS resources for availability, which would mean leaving adequate resources in reserve in case of a huge spike in demand, at a potentially higher cost. Alternatively users can optimize for cost, limiting the availability of resources at the risk of taking a performance hit, which may be worthwhile depending on the specific application, or else they can go for a more balanced approach, shown below.

The auto scaling feature is not exclusive to AWS, as its main rival Microsoft Azure offers a similar service called Azure Autoscale that allows applications to be dynamically scaled to meet spikes in demand. Google LLC also offers similar functions on its cloud platform, but it remains service-specific.

Image: Thomas Cloer/Flickr