# Configuring Amazon ECS Windows container instances to receive Spot Instance notices
<a name="windows-spot-instance-draining-container"></a>

Amazon EC2 terminates, stops, or hibernates your Spot Instance when the Spot price exceeds the maximum price for your request or capacity is no longer available. Amazon EC2 provides a Spot Instance interruption notice, which gives the instance a two-minute warning before it is interrupted. If Amazon ECS Spot Instance draining is enabled on the instance, ECS receives the Spot Instance interruption notice and places the instance in `DRAINING` status.

**Important**  
Amazon ECS monitors for the Spot Instance interruption notices that have the `terminate` and `stop` instance-actions. If you specified either the `hibernate` instance interruption behavior when requesting your Spot Instances or Spot Fleet, then Amazon ECS Spot Instance draining is not supported for those instances.

When a container instance is set to `DRAINING`, Amazon ECS prevents new tasks from being scheduled for placement on the container instance. Service tasks on the draining container instance that are in the `PENDING` state are stopped immediately. If there are container instances in the cluster that are available, replacement service tasks are started on them.

You can turn on Spot Instance draining when you launch an instance. You must set the `ECS_ENABLE_SPOT_INSTANCE_DRAINING` parameter before you start the container agent. Replace *my-cluster* with the name of your cluster.

```
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("ECS_ENABLE_SPOT_INSTANCE_DRAINING", "true", "Machine")

# Initialize the agent
Initialize-ECSAgent -Cluster my-cluster
```

For more information, see [Launching an Amazon ECS Windows container instance](launch_window-container_instance.md).