Posted On: Mar 23, 2022

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now enables customers to help applications scale out faster and save costs by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling Warm Pools with their Amazon ECS clusters. Warm Pools allow customers to create a pool of pre-initialized Amazon EC2 instances that are ready to quickly serve application traffic.

Warms Pools are a good fit for applications that have time-consuming initialization steps- such as pre-loading gigabytes of data or large container images, provisioning services, or running custom scripts- that can add delays before the instance is ready to serve traffic. To use Warm Pools with your Amazon ECS cluster, you simply need to set the ECS_WARM_POOLS_CHECK environment variable to true in the User data of your Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Group launch template. Once this is enabled, Amazon ECS will prevent any Tasks from being started on warm pool instances until the instance enters the Running state.

Customers can now use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools with their Amazon ECS Clusters in all public AWS Regions. For more details, please see our documentation here.