Deployment in AWS with Auto Scaling (DRAFT)

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Easily scale your Grooper processing with cloud-based computing using Amazon Web Services and Auto Scaling.

About AWS

Imagine you normally process a hundred documents a day. Then, out of nowhere, you start getting a thousand documents a day. Maybe its a busy time of year for you. Maybe you landed a huge client and need to process their paperwork. Great news! But how do you account for the increase in computing demands? How do you both scale up your IT infrastructure to meet the new demand and scale it down once the demand has subsided?

One answer lies in cloud-based computing. Spinning up a pool of virtual machines to process the additional workload is, generally speaking, quicker and more cost effective than purchasing and deploying physical computers. Furthermore, what are you going to do once you're done processing all that extra work? With a cloud-based IT infrastructure, you can quickly deactivate those machines and re-activate them as needed on-demand. With a physical infrastructure, you're stuck holding a lot of additional hardware until you need it again.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular on-demand cloud computing providers. Their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) gives users a pay-as-you-go model to create, launch and terminate virtual computers, as needed. These virtual machines (which Amazon calls "instances") can be built to mirror physical computer specifications, including operating system, CPU, RAM and storage options. EC2 encourages scalability with web services that allow you to take a snapshot of a server's configuration (an Amazon Machine Image or "AMI") and boot a virtual machine with whatever software you need already loaded.

Furthermore, the process of spinning up and spinning down virtual machines can be automated with AWS Auto Scaling. This allows users to set auto-scaling parameters, defining when to launch new EC2 instances to meet surges in processing demand. The virtual machines are then terminated as soon as demand dies down. With a pay-for-use model, you only pay for the machines while they're running. Ultimately, this saves you time scaling your IT infrastructure up and down and saves you money only paying for what you need when you need it.

In this article, we will show you how to set up a scalable Grooper deployment using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Auto Scaling.