Configure instance tenancy with a launch configuration - Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Configure instance tenancy with a launch configuration

Tenancy defines how EC2 instances are distributed across physical hardware and affects pricing. There are three tenancy options available:

  • Shared (default) — Multiple Amazon Web Services accounts may share the same physical hardware.

  • Dedicated Instance (dedicated) — Your instance runs on single-tenant hardware.

  • Dedicated Host (host) — Your instance runs on a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use, an isolated server with configurations that you can control.

This topic describes how to launch Dedicated Instances in your Auto Scaling group by specifying settings in a launch configuration. For pricing information and to learn more about Dedicated Instances, see the Amazon EC2 dedicated instances product page and Dedicated Instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

You can configure tenancy for EC2 instances using a launch configuration or launch template. However, the host tenancy value cannot be used with a launch configuration. Use the default or dedicated tenancy values only.

Important

To use a tenancy value of host, you must use a launch template. For more information, see Create a launch template for an Auto Scaling group. Before launching Dedicated Hosts, we recommend that you become familiar with launching and managing Dedicated Hosts using Amazon License Manager. For more information, see the License Manager User Guide.

When you create a VPC, by default its tenancy attribute is set to default. In such a VPC, you can launch instances with a tenancy value of dedicated so that they run as single-tenancy instances. Otherwise, they run as shared-tenancy instances by default. If you set the tenancy attribute of a VPC to dedicated, all instances launched in the VPC run as single-tenancy instances.

When you create a launch configuration, the default value for the instance placement tenancy is null and the instance tenancy is controlled by the tenancy attribute of the VPC. You can specify the instance placement tenancy for your launch configuration as default or dedicated using the create-launch-configuration CLI command with the --placement-tenancy option.

The following table summarizes the instance placement tenancy of the Auto Scaling instances launched in a VPC.

Launch configuration tenancy VPC tenancy = default VPC tenancy = dedicated

not specified

shared-tenancy instances

Dedicated Instances

default

shared-tenancy instances

Dedicated Instances

dedicated

Dedicated Instances

Dedicated Instances
To create a launch configuration that creates Dedicated Instances (Amazon CLI)

Use the following create-launch-configuration command to create a launch configuration that sets the launch configuration tenancy to dedicated.

aws autoscaling create-launch-configuration --launch-configuration-name my-launch-config --placement-tenancy dedicated --image-id ...

You can use the following describe-launch-configurations command to verify the instance placement tenancy of the launch configuration.

aws autoscaling describe-launch-configurations --launch-configuration-names my-launch-config

The following is example output for a launch configuration that creates Dedicated Instances. The PlacementTenancy parameter is only part of the output for this command when you explicitly set the instance placement tenancy.

{
    "LaunchConfigurations": [
        {
            "UserData": null,
            "EbsOptimized": false,
            "PlacementTenancy": "dedicated",
            "LaunchConfigurationARN": "arn",
            "InstanceMonitoring": {
                "Enabled": true
            },
            "ImageId": "ami-b5a7ea85",
            "CreatedTime": "2020-03-08T23:39:49.011Z",
            "BlockDeviceMappings": [],
            "KeyName": null,
            "SecurityGroups": [],
            "LaunchConfigurationName": "my-launch-config",
            "KernelId": null,
            "RamdiskId": null,
            "InstanceType": "m3.medium"
        }
    ]
}