[Yandex Cloud documentation](../../../index.md) > [Yandex Compute Cloud](../../index.md) > [Concepts](../index.md) > Instance groups > Overview

# Instance Groups concepts


Instance Groups is a Compute Cloud component that allows you to create and manage instance groups.
Instance Groups can automatically identify and heal unhealthy instances in a group to ensure their optimal performance.

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To work in Instance Groups, you must use a service account. For more information, see [Access](access.md).

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Each group consists of one or more instances of the same type. Group instances may reside in different availability zones. Learn more about [Yandex Cloud availability zones](../../../overview/concepts/geo-scope.md).

Group instances can also be part of a [VM placement group](../placement-groups.md). To enable this, when [creating an instance group](../../operations/placement-groups/create-ig-in-pg.md), describe placement group parameters in the [instance template](instance-template.md#instance-template). You can create an instance group in a placement group using the [CLI](../../../cli/quickstart.md) and [API](../../api-ref/index.md).

![Instance groups](../../../_assets/instance-groups/ig.svg "Instance groups")

With Instance Groups, you can:

- Simultaneously [update](deploy/index.md) all instances in a group.

- Provide integration with [Yandex Network Load Balancer](../../../network-load-balancer/concepts/index.md) and [Yandex Application Load Balancer](../../../application-load-balancer/concepts/index.md) and evenly distribute workloads across instances.

- Create [automatically scaled instance groups](scale.md#auto-scale).

- Automatically [recover](autohealing.md) a VM instance if an application fails.

- Maintain the performance of application services in a reliable environment with multi-zone features instead of allocating resources for each zone.

- [Handle application stateless and stateful workloads](stateful-workload.md).

When creating a group, you need to describe the following:

- [Template](instance-template.md) for deploying group instances.

- [Policies](policies/index.md) for scaling, deployment, and allocation.

An instance group created in a folder can be accessed by all VMs connected to the same cloud network. For more information about how the network works, see [this Virtual Private Cloud guide](../../../vpc/index.md).

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You can use [reserved instance](../reserved-pools.md) pools to [create instance groups](../../operations/instance-groups/create-group-with-pool.md).

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## See also {#see-also}

* [Creating a fixed-size instance group](../../operations/instance-groups/create-fixed-group.md)
* [Temporarily disabling availability zones for Yandex Compute Cloud instance groups](disable-enable-zone.md)
* [Yandex Compute Cloud instance groups during a zonal incident](zonal-inc/overview.md)

## Use cases {#examples}

* [Running an autoscaling instance group](../../tutorials/vm-autoscale/index.md)