Posted On: Jan 12, 2022
Starting today, you can request EC2 capacity based on your workload’s instance requirements. Attribute-based instance type selection, a new feature for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Fleet, and Spot Fleet, makes it easy to create and maintain instance fleets without researching and selecting EC2 instance types. This is useful for running instance type flexible workloads and frameworks such as containers, big data, and CI/CD, or for simple cases where you want your instance fleets to automatically use the latest generation instance types. Instead of creating and maintaining a list of acceptable instance types, you can now simply define your instance requirements once, and let attribute-based instance type selection handle the rest.
To get started, create or modify an Auto Scaling group or Fleet and specify your workload’s instance requirements. For most general purpose workloads it is enough to specify the number of vCPUs and memory that you need. For advanced use cases, you can specify attributes like storage type, network interfaces, CPU manufacturer, and accelerator type. Once you are done, EC2 Auto Scaling or Fleet will select and launch instances based on the attributes, purchase option, and allocation strategy you selected.
Attribute-based instance type selection is especially helpful for running instance type flexible workloads on EC2 Spot Instances. The best way to use Spot instances is to request capacity across as many instance types as possible. Attribute-based instance type selection makes it easy to pick from the widest array of available instance types based on your instance requirements. It can also future-proof your instance fleets by automatically adding new generation EC2 instance types in your Auto Scaling groups or Fleets as they are released.
For more information, see the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling attribute-based instance type selection documentation, EC2 Fleet attribute-based instance type selection documentation, and Spot Fleet attribute-based instance type selection documentation.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to conditions that you define. You can use the fleet management features to maintain the health and availability of your fleet. For more information, visit the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling documentation page.
Amazon EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet simplify the provisioning of EC2 capacity across different EC2 instance types, Availability Zones, and purchase models (On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Spot) to optimize your application’s scalability, performance, and cost. To learn more about using EC2 Fleet, please visit this page. To learn more about using Spot Fleet, please visit this page.