Amazon ECS Cluster Auto Scaling now supports specifying a custom instance warm-up time

Posted on: Nov 27, 2020

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Cluster Auto Scaling (CAS) now supports specifying a custom instance warm-up time, making scaling more responsive.

Instance warm-up defines the number of seconds it takes for a newly launched instance to warm up. Once the specified warm-up time expires, the instance is counted toward the aggregated metrics of the Auto Scaling group (ASG), and CAS proceeds with its next iteration of calculations to estimate the number instances required. This prevents the ASG from adding more instances than needed. Before this launch, the instance warm-up time was set to a default value of 300 seconds. Now, you can specify a custom instance warm-up time either when creating a new capacity provider or updating an existing one using the AWS SDK or AWS CLI, making the scaling more responsive.

With CAS, the scaling policy of your ASG is managed by Amazon ECS through a capacity provider. You can configure the capacity provider to enable managed scaling of the ASG, reserve excess capacity in the ASG, and also manage termination of instances in the ASG.

This feature is available in all regions where Amazon ECS is available. To learn more, visit the Deep Dive on Amazon ECS Cluster Auto Scaling blog post and documentation.