How to: Auto Scaling Basics
-	📒 [Homepage](https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/) ∙ [User guide](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/latest/userguide/) ∙ [FAQ](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/autoscaling/faqs/) ∙ [Pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/pricing/) at no additional charge
-	[**Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs)**](https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/) are used to control the number of instances in a service, reducing manual effort to provision or deprovision EC2 instances.
-	They can be configured through [Scaling Policies](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/latest/userguide/policy_creating.html) to automatically increase or decrease instance counts based on metrics like CPU utilization, or based on a schedule.
-	There are three common ways of using ASGs - dynamic (automatically adjust instance count based on metrics for things like CPU utilization), static (maintain a specific instance count at all times), scheduled (maintain different instance counts at different times of day or on days of the week).
-	💸ASGs [have no additional charge](https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/pricing/) themselves; you pay for underlying EC2 and CloudWatch services.

[Back to top :arrow_up:](#table-of-contents)