Amazon EC2 added New CPU-Performance Attribute for Instance Type Selection

Starting today, EC2 Auto Scaling and EC2 Fleet customers can express their EC2 instances’ CPU-performance requirements as part of the Attribute-Based Instance Type Selection (ABIS) configuration. With ABIS, customers can already choose a list of instances types by defining a set of desired resource requirements, such as the number of vCPU cores and memory per instance. Now, in addition to the quantitative resource requirements, customers can also identify an instance family that ABIS will use as a baseline to automatically select instance types that offer similar or better CPU performance, enabling customers to further optimize their instance-type selection.

ABIS is a powerful tool for customers looking to leverage instance type diversification to meet their capacity requirements. For example, customers who use Spot Instances to launch into limited EC2 spare capacity for a discounted price, access multiple instance types to successfully fulfill their larger capacity needs and experience fewer interruptions. With this release, for example, customers can use ABIS in a launch request for instances that can be in the C, M, and R instance classes, with a minimum of 4 vCPUs, and provide CPU performance in line with the C6i instance family, or better.

The feature is available in all AWS commercial and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can use Amazon Management Console, CLI, SDKs, and CloudFormation to update your instance requirements. To get started, refer the user guide for EC2 Auto Scaling and EC2 Fleet.