Well, we covered a lot about Auto Scaling and ELB in this chapter; however, there are a few things that I would really recommend you try out next. First up, let's have a look at ELB! In this chapter, we have looked only at how to set up and configure a very basic HTTP-based ELB. However, in a real production scenario, this just doesn't cut it. That's where you need to deploy your ELB using HTTPS and SSL-like secure protocols. To know more about how you can create and leverage ELBs securely, refer to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/elb-https-load-balancers.html.

With your ELB securely configured, there's one additional step that you can configure to enable easier access to your applications hosted on AWS. Route 53 is a highly scalable and available DNS service provided by AWS that can be leveraged to replace the long and complicated public DNS name of an ELB with something a bit more convenient and easier to remember, such as all-about-dogs.com. Amazon Route 53 effectively connects your user requests to infrastructure running in AWS, whether it is your EC2 instances, or ELB, or even your S3 bucket. It can also be used as a health check mechanism to periodically monitor the health of your application and its endpoints. To know more about Route 53 and how you can leverage it with your applications, refer to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-to-elb-load-balancer.html.

On a similar note, there are a couple of things that you can try out for Auto Scaling as well. First up is Scheduled Auto Scaling. We have already talked about it in the beginning of this chapter, so I'll not dwell on it for long. Just a few pointers that you should keep in mind when working with Scheduled Auto Scaling: Each scheduled scaling action has to have a unique date and time provided to it in the UTC format that is generally represented as YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ. You can create a recurring scheduled scaling activity as well; however, note that this will not work side by side with a onetime scheduled activity. Last but not the least, AWS currently does not support scheduled scaling using the EC2 Management Console, which means that you will have to use the AWS CLI for it. To know more on how to leverage Scheduled Auto Scaling for your environments, refer to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide/schedule_time.html.

The final recommendation with regard to Auto Scaling is something a bit new and is called as Lifecycle Hooks. Hooks basically allow you to add a custom event to your instances before they are actually terminated or added to the Auto Scaling Group by the Auto Scaling service. These events can be anything from retrieving logs from your instances to installing and configuring software, and so on. The main idea behind hooks is very similar to the concept of suspending and resuming Auto Scaling processes; however, here we don't suspend the Auto Scaling activity but just put the instance into a definite wait state. It is during this wait state that you get to perform your selected action on your instance. Do note, however, that the default wait period is only an hour. So if you do not perform any action over your instances during this period, Auto Scaling will automatically terminate the instances once the time has passed. And very similar to Schedule Auto Scaling, you cannot perform Lifecycle Hooks using the EC2 Management Console. You can use the AWS CLI or the AWS API to perform the same.