An Instance Type determines a particular set of features and sizes (hardware components) that decide the level of workload – Compute Power (vCPU), Memory, Storage Options, Network Performance.
Link: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
Instance Types
General Purpose
- a balance of compute, memory, and network resources
- T2, T3: low-cost (baseline level) types that provide burst capability
- M4, M5, M6, M7: general workloads, balanced
Compute Optimized
- C4, C5, C6, C7: more capable CPU, for high-performance calculation apps
Memory Optimized
- X1, X2, R4, R5, R6, R7: optimized memory (fast and large amount) for high-performance database
Storage Optimized
- D2, D3: Density High Throughput (HDD), for Data Warehouse, MapReduce, HDFS, Network file systems
- I3: High-speed Random IO (SSD), for No SQL database, data warehouse
- H1: High Disk Throughput for MapReduce
Accelerated Computing
- P2, P3: General purpose GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), for machine learning
- F1: FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), computationally intensive
- G3, G4, G5: Cost-effective GPUs, for video encoding, 3D rendering
HPC Optimized
- Offers the best price performance for running HPC (High Performance Computing) workloads
- Hpc6id: Intel Xeon + EFA (Elastic Fabric Adapter)
- Hpc6a: AMD EPYC + EFA
Memorize the Mnemonic “FIGHT DR MC PX – AZ“
- F (FPGA), I (IOPS), G (Graphics), H (High Throughput), T (Tight – cheap general)
- D (Density High Throughput), R (RAM – memory)
- M (Main or Medium – general), C (Compute)
- P (Pic – graphics), X (Extreme Memory)
- A (Arm-based), Z (Extreme memory and CPU)
Graviton Processors
AWS Graviton processors deliver the best price performance for your workloads running in EC2 instances.
AWS Graviton – Amazon Web Services
- Supports many Linux OSs:
- Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE, and Ubuntu
- It does not support Windows.
- Gravition processors can be used with different types of instances (M6g, C7g, R6g, Im4gn, or G5g)