Resize AWS EC2 Cloud Instances

Scaling for AWS and most other clouds is quite interesting. As I mentioned in my podcast on OTN and also in my “Middelware and Cloud Computing” book you cannot dynamically resize a running cloud instance. E.g. there is no API call to ask for 2.2 GHz CPU speed instead of 1.8 GHz or to dynamically add another 3.5 GB of RAM.

All you can do is switch to another EC2 instance type while the instance is not running. This is why I like to say scaling nowadays involves some granularity (since you can only select the next bigger/smaller instance).

It was alway possible to resize a stopped EC2 instance using

frank@ubuntu:~$ ec2-modify-instance-attribute i-d8bc3eaf –t m1.xlarge

Now this functionality was finally  included into the AWS Management Console. Jeff has a nice blog posting with many screenshots explaining how it works.

 

Comments

  1. mayaofr says

    As a stagiaire working on cloud computing, I am happy about this news.

Speak Your Mind

*