Posted On: Jul 9, 2020

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Management Console now supports specifying a custom capacity provider strategy when you run tasks manually using the Run Task functionality. This capability has been available through the Amazon CLI, SDK, and API, but is now available through the Management Console as well. For use with manually running tasks, a custom capacity provider strategy consists of one or more capacity providers with an optional base and weight specified for each provider, giving you control over how your tasks are distributed across one or more capacity providers. 

ECS capacity providers help you manage compute capacity for containers by allowing the application to define its requirements for how it uses the capacity. With capacity providers, you can define flexible rules for how containerized workloads run on different types of compute capacity, and manage the scaling of the capacity. Capacity providers improve the availability and scalability, and reduce the cost of running tasks and services on ECS. 

Capacity providers work with both EC2 and Fargate. With EC2, you can create a capacity provider associated with an EC2 Auto Scaling group (ASG). The capacity provider can be used to manage scaling of the ASG through ECS cluster auto scaling, ensuring that the capacity necessary to run your task is requested even if it is not yet available. When running tasks and services, you can split them across multiple capacity providers. This enables new capabilities such as running a service in a predefined split percentage across Fargate and Fargate Spot, or ensuring that a service runs an equal number of tasks in multiple availability zones without requiring the service to rebalance.

To learn more about capacity providers, visit our documentation