What is auto scaling? 

Auto Scaling in cloud computing (also known as autoscaling in aws,aws autoscaling, ec2 autoscaling) refers to the ability of a system to automatically adjust its compute resources (such as virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions) based on changing demands. This feature allows applications to dynamically scale up or down in response to fluctuations in workload traffic or resource utilization, ensuring optimal performance, availability, and cost-efficiency. 
 
The main objectives of auto scaling are: 
 
Maintaining Performance: Auto Scaling ensures that an application can handle varying levels of traffic or workload without experiencing performance degradation or downtime. By automatically provisioning additional resources when demand increases and removing resources when demand decreases, the system can adapt to changing conditions in real-time. 
 
Improving Availability: Auto Scaling helps enhance the availability of applications by distributing traffic across multiple instances or resources. In the event of failures or disruptions, the system can automatically replace unhealthy instances and redistribute the workload to healthy ones, thereby minimizing downtime and maintaining service availability. 
 
Optimizing Costs: Auto Scaling enables organizations to optimize their cloud resource costs by dynamically adjusting the number of resources based on actual demand. By scaling resources up during peak periods and scaling down during off-peak periods, organizations can avoid over-provisioning and reduce unnecessary expenses associated with idle resources. 
 
Auto Scaling typically involves defining scaling policies or rules that specify under what conditions additional resources should be provisioned or removed. These policies can be based on various metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, network traffic, or custom application-specific metrics. 
 
Cloud providers offer Auto Scaling services as part of their platform offerings, providing tools and APIs to automate the provisioning and management of resources based on predefined scaling policies. Examples include AWS Auto Scaling, Google Cloud Autoscaler, and Azure Autoscale. 
 
Overall, Auto Scaling plays a crucial role in enabling cloud-native applications to be more agile, resilient, and cost-effective by automatically adapting to changing workload demands.