Amazon AWS Tips and Gotchas – Part 6 – AWS Dedicated VPCs

Continuing in this series of blog posts taking a bit of a “warts and all” view of a few Amazon AWS features, below are a handful more tips and gotchas when designing and implementing solutions on Amazon AWS, including Dedicated VPCs.

For the first post in this series with a bit of background on where it all originated from, see here:
Amazon #AWS Tips and Gotchas – Part 1

For more posts in this series, see here:
Index of AWS Tips and Gotchas

AWS Tips and Gotchas – Part 6

12. AWS Dedicated VPCs

Just a quick one this week, specifically something to watch out for otherwise you risk running up a scary bill very quickly!

When you create a new VPC, you have the option to create it as Default or Dedicated as per the screenshot below:

AWS Dedicated VPCs

Now here’s the rub… if you select dedicated VPC, this will actually cause every single EC2 instance from then on to be created on dedicated hardware (what AWS call single-tenant hardware, i.e. dedicated physical servers!) by default, within that VPC.

Also note that as per the Dedicated Instances KB article, “You can’t change the instance tenancy of a VPC after you create it”.

In other words, if you find you have created your VPC as a dedicated one, you will have to destroy and re-create everything within that VPC to get it back to default (i.e. multi-tenant/shared compute).

AWS Dedicated VPCs invoiceAnyhoo, I said it was just a quick one this week…

Find more posts in this series here:
Index of AWS Tips and Gotchas

Amazon AWS Tips and Gotchas – Part 7 – AWS EMR, Spot Instances & PGs

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