Using heat and ceilometer for providing autoscaling in openstack

Cloud computing is being widely used for providing access to a shared pool of hardware as well as software resources because of its clear advantages like on-demand resource provisioning, elasticity, metered service. For a typical application like eCommerce on cloud, resource usage is highly variable with peak traffic on weekends or during sale period and low during night. For traditional deployment the user would make provision for highest required resources but this scheme does not ensure optimal resource usage and is also not cost effective for user. The characteristic feature of cloud computing elasticity comes to the rescue providing the ability to cloud to automatically scale up or down commensurate with demand. This paper discusses how OpenStack, a widely popular open source IaaS cloud provides auto scaling using heat and ceilometer.