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/
General Purpose
- T2, T3: low-cost (baseline level) types that provide burst capability
- M4, M5: general workloads, balanced
Compute Optimized
- C4, C5: more capable CPU, for high-performance calculation apps
Memory Optimized
- X1, R4, R5: optimized memory (fast and large amount) for high-performance database
Storage Optimized
- D2: 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: Cost-effective GPUs, for video encoding, 3D rendering
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 – general), C (Compute)
- P (Pic – graphics), X (Extreme Memory)
- A (Arm-based), Z (Extreme memory and CPU)
