Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you ensure that you have the correct number of Amazon EC2 instances available to handle the load for your application. You create collections of EC2 instances, called Auto Scaling groups. You can specify the minimum number of instances in each Auto Scaling group, and Auto Scaling ensures that your group never goes below this size. You can specify the maximum number of instances in each Auto Scaling group, and Auto Scaling ensures that your group never goes above this size. If you specify the desired capacity, either when you create the group or at any time thereafter, Auto Scaling ensures that your group has this many instances. If you specify scaling policies, then Auto Scaling can launch or terminate instances as demand on your application increases or decreases.

For example, the following Auto Scaling group has a minimum size of 1 instance, a desired capacity of 2 instances, and a maximum size of 4 instances. The scaling policies that you define adjust the number of instances, within your minimum and maximum number of instances, based on the criteria that you specify.