What is AWS Auto Scaling?

AWS Auto Scaling monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. It provides a unified scaling experience across multiple AWS services including EC2 instances, ECS tasks, DynamoDB tables, and Aurora replicas. Auto Scaling uses scaling policies based on target tracking, step scaling, or scheduled scaling to respond to changing demand. It helps optimize costs by launching instances only when needed and terminating them when demand decreases. Auto Scaling integrates with CloudWatch for monitoring and can maintain application availability during traffic spikes or failures.