How to Test Side Effect of Burst CPU on AWS Auto Scaling

When deploying an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) on AWS, I always have a question in mind: “Will the scaling policy actually work when CPU exceeds the threshold?” Instead of waiting until production gets overwhelmed to find out, I decided to stress test it myself to witness ASG spinning up additional instances.

This article shares how I SSH into an EC2 instance, use the stress tool to push CPU high, and observe everything happening on CloudWatch.

Why Test?

There are 2 main use cases I wanted to verify:

Use case 1: Verify ASG Scaling Policy

You’ve configured ASG with a scaling policy — for example, scale out when average CPU exceeds 70%. But does it actually work? Don’t wait until your production system is under real load to discover a misconfigured policy. Test first, rest easy later.

Use case 2: Verify CloudWatch Alarm & Notification

Beyond auto scaling, you also need to ensure that CloudWatch Alarm sends notifications at the right time — via email, SMS, or Slack through an SNS topic. When the system is overloaded, your team needs to be notified immediately so they can intervene in time. Stress testing helps you verify the entire pipeline: CPU spikes -> Alarm triggers -> Notification reaches the right people.

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have:

• ASG configured with a scaling policy (Target Tracking or Step Scaling) with a CPU threshold (e.g., 70%)
• CloudWatch Alarm set up with SNS notification (email, SMS, Slack…)
• EC2 instances running in the ASG
• SSH access to the instances

Step 1: SSH into the EC2 instance and install stress

SSH into one of the EC2 instances running in the ASG:

ssh -i your-key.pem ec2-user@<instance-public-ip>

Next, install the stress tool:

Amazon Linux 2:

sudo amazon-linux-extras install epel -y
sudo yum install stress -y

Amazon Linux 2023+:

sudo dnf install stress -y

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install stress -y

Step 2: Run stress to push CPU high

After installation, run the following command to spike CPU:

stress --cpu 4 --timeout 300s

Explanation:

• --cpu 4: Creates 4 worker processes, each running continuous calculations to burn CPU. If your instance has 2 vCPUs, 4 workers will push CPU close to 100%.
• --timeout 300s: Runs for 5 minutes. Enough time for CloudWatch to collect metrics and trigger alarms (CloudWatch collects metrics every 5 minutes for basic monitoring by default, or every 1 minute for detailed monitoring).

Open another terminal, SSH into the same instance, and run top to watch CPU usage in real time:

top

You’ll see CPU usage jump to nearly 100% immediately. For a more visual interface, use htop:

sudo yum install htop -y  # Amazon Linux
htop

Tip: If you want to test on multiple instances simultaneously, SSH into each instance and run stress on all of them. This will push the average CPU utilization of the entire ASG up faster, triggering the scaling policy sooner.

Step 3: Observe the results

After running stress, go back to the AWS Console and observe:

CloudWatch Monitoring

Go to CloudWatch -> Metrics -> EC2, and you’ll see the instance’s CPU Utilization spike to nearly 100%. The graph line will jump sharply — this is the moment you’ve been waiting for.

CloudWatch Alarm

Go to CloudWatch -> Alarms, and the alarm you configured will switch to the “In alarm” state (red). At this point:

• The SNS topic gets triggered
• You’ll receive an email or SMS alert that the system is overloaded
• If Slack is integrated, an alert message will also appear in the channel

This is when you verify that: when the system truly encounters an issue, the team will be notified immediately.

Auto Scaling Group

Go to EC2 -> Auto Scaling Groups, and you’ll see:

• Desired Capacity increases (e.g., from 2 to 3)
• A new instance is being launched (status Pending -> InService)
• Activity History records the scaling event with a clear reason

The entire process from CPU spike to new instance creation typically takes about 3-5 minutes, depending on your evaluation period and cooldown period configuration.

Conclusion

With just a simple tool like stress and a few minutes of waiting, you can verify that both the ASG scaling policy and CloudWatch Alarm notification work as expected. This is something you should do every time you set up new infrastructure — don’t wait until the system is actually overloaded to discover that the alarm isn’t firing or ASG isn’t scaling.