US Patent 9804890 Termination policies for scaling compute resources

Approaches are described for enabling a user to specify one or more termination policies that can be used to select which instances in a group of virtual machines (or other compute resources) allocated to the user should be terminated first when scaling down the group of virtual machine instances. The termination policies can be utilized by an automatic scaling service when managing the resources in a multitenant shared resource computing environment, such as a cloud computing environment.