Updating the defined EC2 instance types

[rendyokaIRL]

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Hi team, I'm just wondering, would it be a major ask to for an update to the default EC2 instance types so that they use the latest generation instance types? These should give us a bit better performance for less money that I'm sure everyone won't say no to:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/m5-the-next-generation-of-general-purpose-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-t3-instances-burstable-cost-effective-performance/

Thanks!

[crsimmons]

Hi @the-real-rendyoka

We've actually been tracking this for a while ever since https://github.com/EngineerBetter/concourse-up/issues/47 was raised. It turns out BOSH stemcells didn't support M5 instances until very recently (see https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/bosh-aws-cpi-release/issues/77).

We've actually got this change mostly implemented but I'm hesitant to release it. I noticed that m5.xlarge spot instances have >20% frequency of interruption. We use spot instances for the workers and I'm unsure if this interruption frequency will actually translate to problems in Concourse-up. We will take a closer look internally then make a decision.

[crsimmons]

I looked into this a little bit more. t3 instances aren't as widely available as m5 at the moment. We've had requests from other users to support eu-west-3 which currently does not have t3.

We're looking at adding the option for users to choose not to use spot instances for workers which will make me less wary of the switch over to m5. We'll keep an eye on t3 availability and make the swap when it comes to more regions.

[scarytom]

I'm looking to deploy a new concourse setup, and I was hoping to use m5 instances for the workers. Is there an update on this issue? Would it be possible to make the worker family configurable as well as the size?