How to Create and Manage EC2 Placement Groups: A Step-by-Step Guide

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers powerful tools to optimize your cloud infrastructure. One such tool is EC2 Placement Groups, which allow you to influence the placement of your EC2 instances on physical hardware to improve performance, availability, or fault tolerance. In this article, we’ll walk through how to create and manage EC2 Placement Groups, and when to use each of the available strategies: Cluster, Spread, and Partition.

What are EC2 Placement Groups?

An EC2 Placement Group is a logical grouping of EC2 instances that can help you optimize your infrastructure based on the placement strategy you choose. Each placement group is bound to one of the following strategies:

• Cluster: Instances are packed together in a single Availability Zone to minimize latency.
• Spread: Instances are spread across different hardware to reduce failure risk.
• Partition: Instances are divided into partitions, each on different hardware to isolate failure.

Now, let’s explore how you can create and manage EC2 Placement Groups for each strategy.

Step 1: Setting Up a Placement Group