Determine if the number of vCPUs (Virtual Central Processing Units) used by EC2 On-Demand instances per AWS region is close to the vCPU limit number established by Amazon Web Services, and request a limit increase in order to avoid running into resource limitations for future EC2 provisioning sessions. Amazon EC2 service recently switched from instance count-based limits to vCPU-based limits to simplify the limit management experience for all AWS cloud customers. With vCPU-based limits, Amazon EC2 measures usage towards each limit based on the total number of vCPUs that are assigned to the running On-Demand EC2 instances provisioned within your AWS account. The following table shows the number of vCPUs provided for each instance size. The vCPU mapping for some EC2 instance types may differ – see AWS EC2 Instance Types for more details.
Instance Size | vCPUs |
---|---|
nano | 1 |
micro | 1 |
small | 1 |
medium | 1 |
large | 2 |
xlarge | 4 |
2xlarge | 8 |
3xlarge | 12 |
4xlarge | 16 |
8xlarge | 32 |
9xlarge | 36 |
10xlarge | 40 |
12xlarge | 48 |
16xlarge | 64 |
18xlarge | 72 |
24xlarge | 96 |
32xlarge | 128 |
efficiency
Monitoring vCPU-based limits for your On-Demand EC2 instances will help you to manage better your AWS compute power and avoid resource starvation in case your applications need to scale up or in case you just need to provision multiple EC2 instances in a short period of time.
Note: Currently, there are 5 different vCPU-based limits for On-Demand instances: one limit that governs the usage of Standard Instance families such as A, C, D, H, I, M, R, T, and Z, one limit for Accelerated Instance family (F), one for graphic-intensive instances (G), one for general purpose GPU (P), and one for special memory optimized (X) instances. As an example, this conformity rule demonstrates how to check the vCPU-based limit (and increase the quota) for the Standard Instance family (i.e. A, C, D, H, I, M, R, T and Z instance types).
Audit
To determine if your AWS account is going to reach soon the vCPU-based limit set for the On-Demand instances, perform the following actions:
Remediation / Resolution
To request an increase for the vCPU-based EC2 instance limit based on your application requirements, perform the following actions:
References
- AWS Documentation
- Amazon EC2 FAQs
- On-Demand Instances
- Instance Types
- Optimizing CPU Options
- What Is Service Quotas?
- Requesting a Quota Increase
- AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) Documentation
- ec2
- describe-instances
- service-quotas
- get-service-quota
- request-service-quota-increase
- get-requested-service-quota-change
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You are auditing:
Check for vCPU-Based EC2 Instance Limit
Risk level: Medium