Automatically scaling Ubuntu EC2 deployments with Auto Scaling

If we maintain one or more servers for our organization, it’s hard to predict sometimes what the demand will be on that server. In the case of a popular news site, some articles may be more popular than others, and if something goes viral online, then requests to our site can increase by orders of magnitude in a short period of time. In the past, keeping up with customer demand was a very tedious process, one that may result in having to purchase an entirely new server with more powerful hardware. With our instance being in the cloud, we have more flexibility and can automate the process of bringing more servers online. And that’s exactly what we’re going to work on in this section.

Before we get started, keep in mind that we don’t actually have a popular server in AWS; we only have a simple test server that’s currently running Apache. We can simulate things to a point, but Auto Scaling...