Release: Amazon EC2 on 2009-12-14

This release introduces Spot Instances.

Release Date: December 14, 2009
Latest Version: 2009-11-30
Created On: December 14, 2009
Last Updated: October 09, 2017

New Features

Feature Description
Spot Instances Spot Instances are a new way to purchase and consume Amazon EC2 instances. They enable you to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run any resulting instances for as long as your bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand. Spot Instances are complementary to On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances, providing another option for you to obtain compute capacity. For more information, go to the Spot Instances Concepts section of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Developer Guide or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
Redesigned Getting Started Guide The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Getting Started Guide has been redesigned so that it now focuses primarily on launching an instance using the AWS Management Console, connecting to the instance, and then terminating it. The guide no longer contains information about bundling AMIs and using the command line tools. For that information, go to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

 

Known Issues

Issue Description
Query Version of ModifyInstanceAttribute The Query API ModifyInstanceAttribute request does not allow the block-device-mappings to be modified and the user-data attribute cannot be modified if it already contains data.
Paid AMIs Backed by Amazon EBS AMIs backed by Amazon EBS are not currently supported by Amazon DevPay.
Windows Reserved Instances Reserved Instances are not currently available for Windows.
Windows AMI launch times Windows AMIs take longer to launch than Linux/UNIX instances due to larger AMI sizes and multiple reboots.
Windows AMI sizes Installing software on Windows AMIs can cause them to become large and easily reach the 10 GB limit. Before bundling, check the size of the C:\ volume.
Limitation on drive mapping There is currently no support for volume attachment to devices beyond /dev/sdp on instances running Linux/UNIX and xvdp on instances running Windows.
Security group limitation AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress does not allow port ranges for group grants when using the command-line tools or the Query API. This is only supported through the SOAP API.
Instance limit New users are limited to a maximum of 20 concurrent instances, but many of our customers use hundreds or thousands of instances. If you need a higher limit, go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/html-forms-controller/ec2-request.