Amazon ECS Adds Console Support for Spot Fleet Creation

You can now create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Spot fleet directly from the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) console. Amazon EC2 Spot instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 compute capacity, allowing operating cost reductions of 50-90% compared to EC2 On-Demand instances.

Previously, you could only use On-Demand instances during cluster creation in the ECS console. You had to first create Spot requests using the Spot console, CLI, or SDK and then add your Spot fleet to an ECS cluster.

Now, you can create a Spot fleet directly from the ECS console. When you create a cluster in the ECS console, you can specify a mix of compute resources, set your bid level, and specify whether your Spot fleet should optimize for availability or for cost. This makes it easier to reduce costs significantly when running interruptible tasks such as batch jobs or microservices.

Spot fleet creation from the ECS console is available in all regions where ECS and Spot are available. This includes: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Canada (Central), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney).

You can learn more about using Spot in the ECS console in this blog post.

For more information on EC2 Spot, see the Spot information page.
For more information on cluster management with ECS, see the ECS documentation.