Testing the Auto Scaling group

In order to test the Auto Scaling policy we created in the last step, these are the steps we need to follow:

1. Log in to any of the instances that were created as part of the Auto Scaling group:

   ssh -i <public key> ec2-user@<public ip of the instance>

2. Install the stress package. This package is a utility that is used to impose load on test systems:

   yum -y install stress

3. Now to add a load on one CPU, we can use the following command; this command will time out after 300 seconds (5 minutes):

   stress --cpu 1 --timeout 300&

4. If you go back to the Activity tab in the Auto Scaling console, you will see that Auto Scaling will start spinning up a new instance:

Figure 6.36 – Activity tab

Now you know how an Auto Scaling group adds or terminates instances based on the scaling policy.