title: AWS AutoScaling: how to disable health checks
body: <p>I have a Rube Goldberg system where I launch spot-priced instances in autoscaling groups, without actually being interesting in autoscaling features. It all comes from not being able to get spot-priced instances directly using CloudFormation. Don't ask...</p>
  
  <p>Anyway, for my use case, I want to effectively disable health checks. I never want instances terminated and replaced, ever. I will do all that manually. Because of health checks I am rather often seeing my carefully constructed instances being terminated, and it is very annoying.</p>
  
  <p>So, what are my options?</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Grace period set to maybe 0 or -1 as a way of saying <em>grace period forever</em>?</li>
  <li>Grace period set to Integer.MAX_INT which is probably good enough?</li>
  <li><code>set-instance-health</code> which they advertise for custom health checks: does that override EC2 status checks? Is it permanent?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Thanks for your help!</p>