AWS recently released a new feature called: Warm pools. A warm pool can be particularly useful when you need to scale out instances that require long boot time due to custom configurations at the beginning of the instance lifecycle. Whether this is a deployment, caching or installing an antivirus or all of the previous.

The main advantage of a warm pool is that the instances are initialized and ready to use when needed. In the mean time the instances are stopped so you’re not paying for them, apart from the storage.

Windows instances for example can take longer than Linux instances to be ready and serve in traffic, especially if custom configurations or deployments or registration to some services need to happen.

TBC