AWS has recently introduced a new centralized solution with Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager, designed to consolidate monitoring, analysis, and management of EC2 capacity usage across all customer accounts and AWS Regions from a single interface.
Earlier, organizations operating Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) at scale faced highly complex management overheads in coordinating hundreds of instance types across multiple Availability Zones, On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, and Capacity Reservations (CRs). The underlying capacity data was scattered across the AWS Management Console, Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), Amazon CloudWatch, and various EC2 APIs, creating significant operational friction.
Yet, EC2 Capacity Manager addresses this challenge by aggregating all capacity data into a unified, cross-account, and cross-region dashboard. Furthermore, the service refreshes capacity information hourly and includes 14 days of historical data upon initial setup for immediate analysis.
(Source: AWS News blog)
Sena Yakut, an AWS Security Hero, highlighted the pressing need for this consolidation:
We definitely need a solution for centralized analysis for EC2 instances. Collecting data from multiple sources and analyzing it can be challenging. To solve these, here it is: Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager.
The main dashboard provides a comprehensive view of utilization across all instance types, offering metrics based on vCPUs, instance counts, or estimated costs (calculated using On-Demand rates). The core functionality includes:
- Reservation Metrics: Visualizations track the ratio of used versus unused reserved capacity, providing a direct gauge of reservation efficiency.
- Spot Analysis: The Spot tab focuses on usage patterns, displaying key metrics like the mean time Spot Instances run before being interrupted.
- Direct Management: A feature for operators is the ability to modify On-Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs) directly from the Capacity Manager interface when the reservation exists in the same account, reducing context switching and simplifying reactive changes.
- Data Exports and Integration: Capacity Manager supports data exports to Amazon S3, which allows organizations to retain capacity data beyond the standard 90-day retention period for long-term trend analysis and integration with external Business Intelligence (BI) tools.
- AWS Organizations Integration: The Settings section natively supports centralized, enterprise-wide capacity visibility and delegated access control across multiple accounts, simplifying governance.
(Source: AWS News blog)
The announcement met with mixed reactions within the developer and FinOps community. Many welcomed the operational relief, especially for cost management professionals. A respondent on a popular Reddit thread commented:
I get that this doesn’t affect EC2 instance pricing, but for enterprise FinOps, this is a really nice feature. I do cost optimization for clients, and now I have a free centralized tool that does the work for me.
Ivo Pinto, a Principal Cloud Architect, noted the security and access control benefits on LinkedIn:
Before, if you wanted your teams to know about EC2 reserved capacity coverage and things of that nature, you needed to give them some Cost Explorer IAM permissions. Not anymore. You can give them EC2 Capacity Manager permissions now.
However, others expressed skepticism regarding the long-term cloud value proposition. Another respondent in the same Reddit discussion argued that a centralized tool does not address the core concern of cloud elasticity costs:
The more I go on, the more I feel dishonest not telling my employer, ‘We should start looking into buying servers and going back to the iron. ‘
And Jack Hendy, a Principal Cloud Engineer, tweeted:
Amazon are rate-limiting new EC2 instance launches in us-east-1 after this mornings melt down… which is why some things are still flakey
On Friday, they launched EC2 Capacity Manager the irony
Lastly, Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager is available in all commercial AWS Regions enabled by default and is offered at no additional cost.
