You'll want to make sure you don't autoscale just because a shared resource like a database is not working correctly. There's no point in having more instances

You'll want to make sure you don't autoscale just because a shared resource like a database is not working correctly. There's no point in having more instances up if the new ones don't work either. Elastic Beanstalk can be very useful, especially for deploying new versions of your app. It has a CLI that makes it easy to SSH to all of your instances as well. And application environments can be configured to save its logs to an S3 bucket. And it has support for time-based scaling events, so you can have more hosts up during the day if that's what you need.