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ECS Service Auto Scaling

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Amazon ECS Service Auto Scaling allows you to automatically adjust your ECS services' desired task count in response to changing workloads. You can configure two types of scaling policies: Target Tracking Scaling and Step Scaling. Target Tracking Scaling maintains a specified average value for a ch…

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect - ECS Service Auto Scaling Example Questions

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Question 1

An e-commerce company runs its web frontend as an ECS service. After a recently successful marketing campaign, they expect traffic spikes. How can they prepare for the traffic spikes with minimal manual work?

Correct Answer: Set up ECS Service Auto Scaling with target tracking and configure multiple scaling policies.

ECS Service Auto Scaling with target tracking, supports multiple scaling policies, allowing automatic adjustment of running tasks based on predefined metric targets when traffic spikes occur. Other options like custom Lambda scalers, enabling AWS Auto Scaling for the entire ECS cluster, or scaling the underlying EC2 instances alone don't adapt dynamically.

Question 2

Your APIs run on an Amazon ECS service (on Fargate or EC2) behind an Application Load Balancer target group. You need to automatically scale the service’s desired task count in response to traffic so that each task handles approximately a fixed number of requests. Which approach should you use?

Correct Answer: Use ECS Service Auto Scaling with a target tracking policy on the ALB RequestCountPerTarget metric.

To scale an ECS service based on the number of requests each task receives behind an Application Load Balancer, you should configure ECS Service Auto Scaling (via Application Auto Scaling) with a target tracking scaling policy that uses the ALB RequestCountPerTarget metric (CloudWatch metric name RequestCountPerTarget in the AWS/ApplicationELB namespace). This policy automatically adjusts the service's desired task count to maintain the specified target requests per target for the associated ALB target group. The horizontal pod autoscaler is a Kubernetes feature and does not apply to ECS. Manually adjusting task count does not fulfill the requirement for dynamic, automated scaling. Enabling Auto Scaling at the cluster or instance layer affects capacity of underlying EC2 instances, not the ECS service's desired task count based on ALB request load.

Question 3

A company uses Amazon ECS to deploy a critical application with multiple microservices. The chief architect notices that one of the microservices has variable load and needs to scale automatically to maintain optimal performance. Which configuration should be implemented for this ECS service?

Correct Answer: Configure Service Auto Scaling with target tracking scaling policies.

Service Auto Scaling with target tracking scaling policies is the appropriate solution as it adjusts the desired number of tasks automatically based on predefined CloudWatch metric targets. EC2 Auto Scaling only scales the underlying instances, and enabling cluster-level scaling doesn't address the specific microservice. Scheduled scaling actions and Lambda functions require manual management, increasing the complexity.

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