NEW – AWS Spot Instances Support Dedicated Tenancy

We’re very excited to spread the news about the availability of Dedicated tenancy for AWS Spot instances. Regular tenancy on AWS means that your EC2 instances are running on the same underlying physical host (Hypervisor) as other AWS customers. By choosing “Dedicated Tenancy” you are ensuring that your EC2 instances are running on the same underlying physical host. This provides some benefits like ensuring a “noisy neighbor” is not impacting your instances. This also provides clients with additional compliance capabilities such as HIPAA compliance for workloads that deal with Patient Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) according to the Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS.

To start using “Dedicated Tenancy” on AWS simply ensure that you configure your Elastigroup for “dedicated” Tenancy in the Elastigroup configuration (this can be found in the compute tab while in edit mode)

If you are using the API simply make sure you add the “tenancy” field under “launchSpecification” as you can see below.

"launchSpecification": {
       "loadBalancersConfig": {
         "loadBalancers": [
              {
                   "name": "MyClassicLB",
                   "type": "CLASSIC"
               }
           ]
       },
       "healthCheckType" : "ELB",
       "healthCheckGracePeriod" : 300,
       "tenancy" : "dedicated",

Currently supported Instance types are listed below:

Current Generation

• c3.8xlarge
• c4.8xlarge
• d2.8xlarge
• g2.8xlarge
• i2.8xlarge
• m4.10xlarge
• m4.16xlarge
• p2.16xlarge
• r3.8xlarge
• r4.16xlarge
• x1.32xlarge

Previous Generation

• cc2.8xlarge
• cg1.4xlarge
• cr1.8xlarge
• hi1.4xlarge

Find out more about the AWS HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) here:

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/

Please keep in mind that when you are using Dedicated tenancy AWS will charge a flat hourly fee per region for this service. Please refer to the Dedicated Tenancy page for information on this flat hourly fee https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/dedicated-instances/.

Conclusion

When dealing with compliant workloads in the cloud it’s easy for costs to get out of control. We make it easy to save a large portion of your compute costs and still remain compliant, even for HIPAA and PCI workloads! We’re very excited about this feature and we think you will be too when you receive your AWS bill!