Introduction to Amazon EC2 placement groups

When working with Amazon EC2, ensuring optimal performance for your applications is a primary concern. This is where EC2 placement groups come into play. Think of placement groups as a strategy by which you can dictate how instances are positioned relative to each other within a single data center or across multiple data centers. They are tailored to suit applications that require high network throughput, low latency, or both.

AWS recognized very early that while EC2 offers immense flexibility, some workloads needed a fine-tuned environment to thrive. For tasks that demand rapid data transfer between instances or those that need to minimize the noisy neighbor effect, the typical EC2 environment might not suffice. Enter placement groups, Amazon’s solution to providing a high-speed, low-latency environment by keeping the instances relatively close together.

Note

The noisy neighbor effect refers to a situation in a shared hosting...