Recommendations and best practices

Now that we have come to the end of this chapter, let us look at some key recommendations and best practices that you need to keep in mind when working with ELBs and Auto Scaling:

• Plan and provide the ELB with enough of a grace period (by default its 300 seconds) so that it does not put an instance in the unhealthy state even before the application has had time to initialize completely.

• Use Amazon Route 53 and provide a suitable domain name for your applications. Additionally, leverage Route 53 to balance your application's load across multiple regions as well.

• Although ELBs can handle large loads (up to 20k/sec), they can only do so if the load increases gradually, say over a period of several hours. If your application spikes in load in minutes rather than hours, then you are better off by using pre-warmed ELBs. To know more about pre-warmed ELBs and how to get them, refer to http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1636185810492479#pre-warming.

• Configure HTTPS and...