How to Use EC2 Placement Groups for High Availability

Author

Govardhana M K
July 17, 2025

TechOps Examples

Hey — It's Govardhana MK 👋

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

How to Use EC2 Placement Groups for High Availability

When you launch an EC2 instance, AWS decides where it runs inside the Availability Zone. If you don't control that, instances might end up too close or all in one place. Placement Groups help you control this. You can keep instances close for performance or spread them out for high availability.

There are three types of Placement Groups: Cluster, Spread and Partition

1. Cluster

This type places all EC2 instances in the same Availability Zone and typically in the same rack. This setup provides very low network latency and high throughput between instances. It is ideal when fast and consistent communication between instances is critical.

Best suited for: high performance computing, big data processing, low latency workloads, tightly coupled distributed systems

2. Spread

This type places each EC2 instance on distinct hardware, across separate racks, and even across different Availability Zones if needed. It is designed to reduce the risk of simultaneous hardware failures.

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You can have up to seven running instances per Availability Zone in a single spread group.

Best suited for: critical applications, small number of fault isolated instances, highly available workloads, resilient system components

3. Partition

This type spreads EC2 instances across logical partitions. Each partition is isolated from others at the hardware level, including racks, network, and power. Even if one partition fails, others continue running unaffected.

You can control which instances go into which partition, and span across multiple Availability Zones.

Best suited for: large distributed systems, big data platforms like Hadoop and Cassandra, failure-isolated workloads, scalable architectures across AZs

Now that we’ve covered the basics of AWS Placement Groups, let’s deep dive into how to get the best out of them when building high availability designs.

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