Auto Scaling Groups

You can access the auto scaling console from the side bar on the EC2 dashboard page.

Auto scaling groups scale based on target groups (which in turn link to load balancers) or sometimes directly with load balancers. Essentially the ASG defines a set of policies to trigger instance scaling on for a specific load balancer so that when conditions are met instances can be spun up or down with the attending ALB distributing traffic across the new set of instances.

You can scale up a family instances manually by setting the desired capacity property.

You can inspect which load balancers an ASG is linked to by looking at the target group links in the “Load balancing” section of the ASG page. These target groups also click through to the load balancers themselves.