Patent attributes
Techniques are described for enabling a service provider to determine an electrical (e.g., and thermal) topology that indicates which racks (e.g., physical server(s)) have a shared risk due to shared data center infrastructure, and place virtual machine instances into the physical servers based on the topology and a user-specified preference of a virtual machine instance type. In one embodiment, a computer-implemented method includes accessing a topology, for each lineup of a plurality of lineups that each comprise a plurality of racks of physical servers, that indicates one or more powered components utilized by that lineup, selecting a first physical server from a first lineup of the plurality of lineups at which to launch the first virtualized computing resource and a second physical server from a second lineup of the plurality of lineups at which to launch the second virtualized computing resource based on one or more virtualized computing resource preferences and the topologies for the plurality of lineups, and causing the first physical server to execute the first virtualized computing resource and the second physical server to execute the second virtualized computing resource.