Improving the Application Performance by Auto-Scaling of Microservices in a Containerized Environment in High Volumed Real-Time Transaction System

Horizontal scalability is very crucial in cloud applications. For microservices applications that are installed in AWS cloud environment, auto-scaling feature will automatically scale applications based on the configurations. Amazon ECS can calculate service performance as per CPU and memory resources consumed at a point in time and it provides data to CloudWatch metrics, such as ECSServiceAverageCPUUtilization and ECSServiceAverageMemoryUtilization. This paper discusses how auto-scaling can be achieved using the metrics and applying the scaling policies proportionally. Details of how the metrics collection strategies can be used for Application Auto-Scaling to scale services installed in the AWS cloud environment are discussed. It is observed that auto-scaling not only supports scaling up the instances in peak hours but also scales down the instances when there is minimal or no load on the application. Auto-scaling keeps monitoring the instance metadata. It helps in identifying the health status of the instances. It is observed that in peak load situations, if there is a demand for instant user requests or there is a surprise increase in user transactions increase in user requests, auto-scaling automatically adds more resources to handle the situation, which makes the system fault tolerant.