Patent attributes
Apparatus and method are described that relate to reserved virtual machine instances and location policies. Customers of a provider network can reserve one or more reserved virtual machine instances in a reservation and also specify a location policy for the reservation. The location policy provides restrictions as to which hardware may or may not be used to launch the reserved instances and/or how close together the hardware should or should not be to launch the instances of the reservation. The location policies afford customers some degree of control over which hardware is used by the provider network to launch the instances. As such, customers can help control increase security and/or reduce latency of their instances, or control other aspects of their instances.