What happened
Salesforce used the new IC Placement capability in Amazon SageMaker AI Inference Components to make its Agentforce models highly available across multiple Availability Zones. The new SchedulingConfig parameter controls copy placement across instances and AZs.
Why it matters
The ICs cut infrastructure costs by 8x by co-hosting models on shared GPUs, but default placement didn't meet Salesforce's compliance bar of 2-AZ support for every production model. The new placement algorithm balances copies across AZs and instances to avoid single points of failure.
What to watch
AWS recommends setting CopyCount to at least 2 and using SPREAD placement with MaxImbalance 0 or 1 to maintain 2-AZ compliance. Salesforce chose SPREAD to prioritize fault isolation over packing density.
Summaries like this, in your inbox every morning.
Salesforce's challenge was that while SageMaker Inference Components cut GPU costs by sharing hardware, the default placement algorithm didn't consider AZ balance, risking single points of failure. The new SchedulingConfig parameter addresses this by letting customers control placement with AvailabilityZoneBalance and PlacementStrategy. Salesforce chose SPREAD to maximize fault isolation, ensuring a single instance failure doesn't take down multiple copies of a model. The feature also supports scaling while maintaining balance, and AWS recommends using On-Demand Capacity Reservations for capacity planning in high-demand regions. Monitoring tools like SageMaker AI Insights help track AZ balance and rebalancing events to maintain compliance over time.
Pick your industry and the AI tools you use, and get news related to your work every day.
Free · 30 seconds with Google · unsubscribe anytimeWhat is AIToday? →
Ask AI anything about this article. The AI reads this article, earlier AIToday articles, and Wikipedia, and cites its sources. Q&As are published on this page for other readers too.
The Motley Fool argues Amazon is the AI company of the two, since AWS was just 21% of first-half 2026 revenue…
Hewlett Packard Enterprise stock is down 5% at $55.87
Cammarata reinterprets InceptionV1's cat-car neuron as a V-shape detector, not two unrelated concepts
Google Deepmind's Gemini 4 Argon scored 97.5 percent on ARC-AGI-3 at a cost of $4,800, second only to GPT-6 As…
Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, using Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, starts at $2,599 (up to $5,899)
Meta's new commercial terms, effective October 30th, appear to let it crawl and train AI on content from websi…
