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Types of EC2 Instances

Sep 13, 20242 min read

You can use different types of EC2 instances for your business needs. Each type of EC2 instance is optimised for different use cases and has varieties in terms of compute power, memory, storage, and network performance.

Instance naming convention

The naming for a type of an instance differs from the others. Take the following m5 general purpose instance as example:

m5.2×large
  • m: instance class
  • 5: generation (AWS improves them over time)
  • 2×large: size within the instance class

Instance types - General Purpose

The general purpose EC2 instances are suitable for diversity of workloads such as hosting web servers or used as code repositories. They have the balance between compute power, memory, storage and network performance.

Instance types - Compute Optimized

Compute optimized instances are designed for compute-intensive tasks that require high performance processors. For example:

  • Batch processing workloads
  • Media transcoding
  • High performance web servers
  • High Performance Computing (HPC)
  • Scientific modeling
  • Machine Learning (ML)
  • Dedicated gaming severs As of now in 2023, Compute optimized instances are named with a leading letter C, such as C6g, C5, C5a, etc.

Instance types - Memory Optimized

Memory optimized instances have fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory. The uses cases are:

  • High performance, relational/non-relational databases
  • Distributes web scale cache stores (ElastiCache)
  • In-memory databases optimised for Business Intelligence (BI)
  • Applications performing real-time processing of big unstructured data The memory optimised instances are named with a leading R for RAM, X, and z as of 2023.

Instance types - Storage Optimized

Storage optimized instances are great for storage-intensive tasks that require high, sequential read and write access to large data sets on local storage. The use cases are:

  • High frequency Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems.
  • Relational and NoSQL databases
  • Cache for in-memory databases (i.e. Redis)
  • Data warehousing applications
  • Distributed files systems The storage optimised class instances have a leading letter I, D or H as of 2023.

Back to parent node: EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud

Cloud_computingAWSAWS_CLF-C02EC2EC2_instance_types

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