Amazon ElastiCache Auto Scaling

Why Amazon ElastiCache Auto Scaling?

Amazon ElastiCache provides fully managed, automatic scaling to maintain steady performance for your application demands. It removes the complexity of managing cluster capacity for your workloads by making it easy to define resource requirements and scaling behaviors. ElastiCache will automatically scale your cluster based on these scaling plans, enabling you to save on overall cloud spend by matching provisioned resources with changing capacity requirements.

Amazon ElastiCache uses AWS Auto Scaling to manage scaling and Amazon CloudWatch metrics to determine when it is time to scale up or down. ElastiCache offers two types of scaling. First, you can use dynamic scaling, which scales your cluster automatically to keep a target metric, like free memory capacity, steady while load on your cluster changes. In doing so, you can increase performance of clusters when needed and reduce consumption when resources aren’t required. Second, you can use scheduled scaling to determine days and times to scale to accommodate predictable workload capacity changes.

Learn more about auto scaling in the Amazon ElastiCache User Guide.

Benefits

Amazon ElastiCache makes it easy to define auto scaling plans to define how your cluster scales. You can enable auto scaling quickly on an existing or already running cluster. Setting up takes just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or through the AWS SDK or CLI. ElastiCache uses AWS Auto Scaling to manage the scaling of your cluster.

When you set up auto scaling for Amazon ElastiCache, you apply a scaling policy based on predefined metrics so that you can optimize for your applications specific needs, whether that be performance or cost optimization. AWS Auto Scaling sets targets based on your preferences and monitors your application to add or remove capacity as your demand changes.

When your Amazon ElastiCache clusters exceed or fall below your target value, AWS Auto Scaling adjusts your scaling capacity so that you continue to meet your performance requirements even when your workloads continuously change or become unpredictable. When your demand spikes, AWS Auto Scaling increases your cluster capacity to maintain high performance.

Amazon ElastiCache auto scaling helps optimize cost efficiency so you can pay only for what you actually need. When demand drops, AWS Auto Scaling adjusts your clusters to avoid overprovisioning and overspending. Amazon ElastiCache auto scaling is free to use, and you only pay for the capacity provisioned for your cluster.