AWS EC2 Instance Types

AWS EC2 Instance Types

In general, Amazon EC2 instances types provide you with the flexibility and scalability with different computing, memory, and storage specifications within each instance family. EC2 instances are broadly categorized on the basis of budget and workload requirements. The type of an AWS instance determines the underlying hardware of the instances which are launched.

There are several types of AWS instances with different configurations and benefits.

• General purpose
• Compute optimized
• Memory optimized
• Accelerated Computing
• Storage optimized

Now, let us take a look at what each of these five EC2 instances types offer in more detail:

General-purpose Instances

General-purpose instances provide a balance among compute, memory, and networking resources, and they can be used for a variety of workloads.

A1 Instances

A1 instances are used in applications that work in synchrony with the Arm ecosystem and are suitable for scale-out workloads. They are suitable for these applications:

• Web servers
• Containerized microservices
• Caching fleets
• Distributed data stores
• Applications that require the Arm instruction set

M5, M5a, and M5d Instances

These instances offer a balance among compute, memory, and networking resources providing an ideal cloud design. It could be used for a wide range of applications. M5 instances are well-suited for the following applications:

• Web and application servers
• Small and medium databases
• Gaming servers
• Caching fleets

T2 and T3 Instances

These instances provide clock up or down of CPU performance. These instances are well-suited for the following applications:

• Websites and web applications
• Code repositories
• Development, build, test, and staging environments
• Microservices

Compute-optimized Instances

These instances are useful for compute-dependent applications that need high-performance processors. They are well suited for the following applications:

• Batch processing workloads
• High-performance web servers
• High-performance computing (HPC)
• Scientific modeling
• Dedicated gaming servers and ad serving engines

C5, C4, and C5n are the instances under this category.

Memory-optimized Instances

These instances are for delivering fast performance for processing large data sets in memory.

R4, R5, R5a, and R5d instances are memory optimized.

These instances can be used in these following applications:

• High-performance, relational (MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, etc.) databases
• Applications which process real-time big data sets (financial services, Hadoop/Spark clusters, etc.)

Accelerated Computing Instances

These instances are the latest gen general-purpose instances, and they provide an accelerated performance when the CPU clock rate increases.

P3, P2, G3, and F1 are instances for accelerated computing.

P3 and P2 are general-purpose instances.

G3 is for graphic-intensive applications.

Storage-optimized Instances

Storage-optimized instances are designed for workloads that contain very large data sets which have to be written in memory and require high, sequential read and write access.

D2 instances feature up to 48 TB of HDD-based local storage and offer the lowest price-per-disk throughput performance on Amazon EC2.

H1 instances provide a balance between compute and memory and features up to 16 TB of HDD-based local storage which delivers high-disk throughput.

I3 instances provide Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD-backed instance storage optimized for low latency, very high random I/O performance, high-sequential read throughput, and high IOPS at a low cost.