AWS EC2 Launchtemplate vs Launchconfiguration

Question

I’m wondering when one should use which one.

It seems Launchtemplates are more advanced because they allow for versioning but on the other side you cannot set EBS settings etc.

Is Launchtemplate a better version of Launchconfiguration or do they serve different purposes so meaning if you don’t want versioning stick with Launchconfigs with no harm for the future.

Thanks A

Answer 1

According to this post on reddit:

Launch templates allow control of the T2 unlimited (credits) feature, at least that is the one feature I needed, so had to use launch templates.

However, it seems that a launch template specifies exactly one subnet, rather than a list (like launch configurations).

They're quite difference and CloudFormation and it has sucked up several hours of trial and error on my part to get them working.

From my experience, you cannot specify a subnet in either a launch configuration or launch template so I'm not sure where that came from. It appears to me that a launch template is the new version of a launch configuration but I have not seen anywhere that AWS is saying they'll deprecate launch configurations.

I do remember when they brought in application load balancers, it took a while for them to announce deprecation of classic load balancers so my gut feel is that's what will happen here too. Note the CloudFormation docs for Autoscaling Groups recommend using launch templates to get the latest features.

Personally, I'm still using launch configurations since it does not appear very hard to translate to launch templates if/when the time comes, AWS will even do it for you.