Amazon ECS Managed Instances infrastructure optimization
Amazon ECS Managed Instances automatically provisions right-sized EC2 instances based on your Capacity Provider configuration and current workload demands, ensuring your containerized applications have the appropriate compute resources from the moment they're deployed. As your application traffic patterns evolve and workload requirements change over time, Amazon ECS Managed Instances continuously monitors and optimizes your infrastructure by intelligently adjusting instance sizes to match current needs, proactively replacing instances that have drifted from optimal configurations, and dynamically balancing cost efficiency, application performance, and system reliability. This resource management system operates without any manual intervention, reducing infrastructure cost while maintaining high availability for your applications.
Infrastructure optimization has the following benefits:
-
Cost optimization - Reduces infrastructure costs by maximizing resource utilization and eliminating idle capacity
-
Performance improvement - Optimizes workload placement based on resource requirements and performance characteristics
-
Operational simplicity - Automates complex resource management decisions without requiring manual intervention
-
Reliability enhancement - Maintains high availability through intelligent workload distribution and health monitoring
Amazon ECS Managed Instances performs two types of infrastructure optimizations to maximize efficiency and reduce costs:
Idle Instance Detection
Identifies and removes EC2 instances that have no running tasks, eliminating unnecessary infrastructure costs from unused capacity. When an idle instance is detected, the optimization process marks the container instance as DEREGISTERING, which initiates the cleanup sequence that safely terminates the underlying EC2 instance.
Underutilized Instance Detection
Analyzes task distribution across instances to identify opportunities for better resource allocation. When tasks are running sub-optimally across multiple instances, Amazon ECS Managed Instances consolidates workloads onto fewer, more efficiently utilized instances, reducing overall costs while maintaining performance. The optimization process marks underutilized container instances as DRAINING, which triggers task replacement to move workloads to existing or new, more efficient instances. Once all tasks are safely migrated, the instance transitions to DEREGISTERING state and is cleaned up. This optimization applies to instances running service tasks and ensures safe consolidation by respecting your service's minimum and maximum task limits, honoring start-before-stop deployment behavior, and maintaining any task protection settings throughout the draining process. Instances running standalone tasks are not considered for optimization since ECS Managed instances does not replace standalone tasks.
These optimizations work together to ensure your infrastructure continuously adapts to actual workload demands, automatically eliminating waste and improving resource utilization without impacting application availability. Both mechanisms use event-driven monitoring that responds to task and instance lifecycle events to identify optimization opportunities in real-time. Amazon ECS Managed Instances detects when the last task stops on a container instance, indicating a potential idle condition for cost optimization. For underutilized instances, any task stop or new instance launch triggers analysis to identify opportunities for workload consolidation and improved resource efficiency.
ScaleInAfter
Both infrastructure optimizations look for opportunities to terminate running instances to improve utilization and reduce costs. You can control the timing of these actions using the ScaleInAfter configuration in Amazon ECS Managed Instances capacity provider settings, which applies to both idle and underutilized instances. ScaleInAfter allows you to specify the delay, in seconds, between the instance becomes idle or underutilized and the moment Amazon ECS Managed Instances starts optimizing your infrastructure. You can set the delay between 0 and 3600 seconds. You can also specify -1 to disable infrastructure optimization.
- Idle Instances
-
-
ECS waits for the specified duration after the last task stops before deregistering the instance
-
If a new task starts during the waiting period, the instance is no longer considered idle and termination is cancelled
-
- Underutilized Instances
-
-
ECS waits for the specified duration after a task stop event that results in the instance becoming underutilized before draining the instance
-
If a new task is launched or an existing task is stopped on a particular instance during the waiting period, the timer resets from either the most recent task stop or new task creation time, and Amazon ECS Managed Instances re-evaluates for inefficiencies and takes actions if necessary after the new waiting period expires
-
This configuration is optional. When not specified, ECS Managed Instances automatically determines optimal timing based on ECS Managed Instances default configuration.