Maintaining Availability With Auto Scaling – Part 1

By Shantanu Kaushik

Recently, while attending a cloud conference, I came across use case scenarios from multiple startups and organizations on track for business expansion or organizations running at scale after business expansion. Intermittently, almost every organization had different prospects about Auto Scaling and its usefulness.

In today’s world, almost every other task is being handled online, not just as an alternative, but as a preferred and primary way of handling it. The days where transaction handling was a centralized process are gone. With a distributed network and distributed application and computing architecture, we are at a place in technology where geographical distances can be shortened by defining availability zones and implementing edge computing with different segments of technology, including content delivery networks, security, and global network acceleration.

Alibaba Cloud is great at assessing needs and dedicating resources to improve technological outreach and innovation. Alibaba Cloud Auto Scaling helps maintain a smooth user experience and availability for enterprises and organizations free of cost.

My Take on Organizations and Their Point of View – The Story

Organization A

Let’s talk about scale. I have come across organizations that scaled their application structure to accept orders during the 2020 Double 11 Global Shopping Festival in China. Let’s imagine an organization that can handle the extensive user load. We will call them Organization A. This multi-national organization created a hybrid application structure to facilitate order placement, invoices, payments, and logistics operations for product delivery.

This solution was provided to an international sports merchandise organization. Within three days of the Double 11 Global Shopping Festival, they could accept more than one million orders in under an hour. However, they had set policies to scale the server loads by enabling up to six million hourly transactions. All this was possible with Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure. They used Bare Metal instances for dedicated and high-performance computing infrastructure and Alibaba Cloud PolarDB for storage.

This organization has been contemplating enabling Auto Scaling. Through this article, we can ponder the different aspects of Auto Scaling and how it could fit in the pipeline. Before we get to that, let’s use another example of scaling requirements from another organization.

Organization B

Organization B is a video transcoding, editing, and streaming service that handles massive traffic loads daily. They have an in-house solution and have completed parts of their digital transformation with a stable and robust cloud infrastructure. They adopted Alibaba Cloud as their cloud partner after researching other cloud service providers and their user policies.

They recently implemented Alibaba Cloud Auto Scaling, and the results have been fruitful. This organization anticipated a surge in cost scenarios after switching to Auto Scaling, but they witnessed massive cost savings with cloud spending. As we said before, Auto Scaling is free of cost, but you have to pay for added the ECS instances you use while scaling up.

This organization could achieve a near-perfect scaling cycle, where Auto Scaling enabled highly synchronized scaling to scale up or down based on changing network traffic loads.

Organization C

Organization C focuses on data processing and presentation. They work with Data Warehousing, Data Lakes, and Big Data Analysis as a one-stop solution to provide a wider understanding and comparison of your data from any point in time. It has superb feature integration and can read data from practically any source.

They deployed using Object Storage Service (OSS), robust Big Data Infrastructure, and Elastic Compute Service (ECS) with management help from Auto Scaling. With massive shifts in data from one point to another and intensive calculations, Auto Scaling is helping them reach their customers by facilitating a more holistic approach for the users to gain momentum in their businesses and maximize business intelligence.

Organization D

Organization D wants to become leaders in online lending. This FinTech organization shares its applications with multi-points of end-users with different mobile devices sending in requests related to lending. FinTech organizations have to deal with many regulatory factors and privacy compliance requirements to operate in different countries.

This FinTech organization enabled Auto Scaling to accommodate time-driven user requests with peak traffic load at different times. These FinTech firms have to implement AI-driven solutions and strong security to work with customer identification, credit scores, and bank account linking.

The Common Saying

Everybody at this conference had one thing in common. They agreed that Alibaba Cloud offers superb pre-sales and after-sales support that gives customers more confidence. Alibaba Cloud provides regular follow-ups for service demands, feedback, and a dedicated team acting as relationship manager and support staff for additional stability.

Wrapping Up

Alibaba Cloud was recently named among cloud leaders in a report by Gartner. This showcases Alibaba Cloud’s enormous capability in terms of innovation and what they bring to the tech world.

In this article, we discussed use cases in real-world scenarios. In Part 2 of this 4-part series, we will introduce all the aspects of Auto Scaling, the benefits and features, and formulate a wider implementation strategy to help start or expand your digital transformation journey.

Community

Maintaining Availability With Auto Scaling – Part 1

My Take on Organizations and Their Point of View – The Story

Organization A

Organization B

Organization C

Organization D

The Common Saying

Wrapping Up

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