Instance availability

Question

Tried to spin up an F1 instance in the NoVA data center yesterday and was unable to for at least 15 minutes after which I gave up. Haven't had this happen before and was curious as to the reason and if there are any statistics about availability as this potentially impacts my realtime service. Error message reads like all instances were utilized. And I wanted to confirm this can't happen with reserved instances? And is there an easy way to be agnostic to data center to minimize this risk for on demand instances?  
  
AWS CLI returned message "An error occurred (InsufficientInstanceCapacity) when calling the StartInstances operation (reached max retries: 4): Insufficient capacity."

Deep_P · Answer

Hello,  
  
I apologize for the capacity issues you had to face. This happens when there isn't enough capacity in the Region/Availability Zone.   
One way to mitigate this is to setup your subnets to span across all AZ's in a region and try launching in different subnets first and then trying various regions.   
  
Reserved Instances is a billing construct to reduce cost, and I believe what you are looking for is a 'Capacity Reservation'  
  
More details on these can be found here:   
  
Let me know if the steps in the above post don't help you and we can look into this further.  
  
-Deep

ljp0101 · Answer

Thanks, good to know. Fortunately this didn't cause me any real problems and I can plan to make sure it doesn't.

Instance availability

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