EC2 instance types

When we were creating EC2 instances we saw that there are many types of EC2 instances available from which we selected t2.micro .Now we will study some of them so that we can make an educated guess on what type of instance we need.

EC2 has the following type of instances available:

1. General Purpose
2. Compute Optimized
3. Memory Optimized
4. Accelerated Computing
5. Storage optimized

Let us look each of these:

General Purpose

These instances provide a balance of compute power, memory network. These are general purpose and can be used for a variety of workloads these are good for using as web servers, you can use them as your virtual environments to build, deploy, test and so on. These instances contain the

• T series
• M series
• MACos family of servers.

Compute Optimized(CPU optimized)

Compute optimized instances are ideal for compute bound applications that need high performance computations for running correctly. These types of instances are used for scientific modelling, gaming servers, media trans coding machine learning etc. These instances contain the

• C series family of servers.

Memory Optimized(RAM optimized)

Memory optimized instances are used to deliver fast performance on large datasets in memory. These types of servers are best used to setup real time database analytics, caches etc. These instances contain the

• R series
• x series
• U series
• Z series family of servers.

Storage Optimized(ROM optimized)

These instances are used when we need to perform many read and writes simultaneously. these provide low latency to IO operations to applications. These are used for setting up databases, data warehousing etc. These instances contain the

• I series
• D series
• H series family of servers.

Accelerated Computing

Accelerated computing instances use hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform functions, such as floating point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching, more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs. These are used for machine learning, speech recognition, seismic analysis etc. These instances contain the

• P series
• G series
• F series family of servers.

These were about all the servers available on EC2 for details visit EC2 documentation. Next we will study how we can save money if we know how long we will these EC2 instances for.