EC2 Instance Types Overview¶

You can use different types of EC2 instances that are optimized for different use cases: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

Currently we have 7 different types of EC2 instances: - General Purpose - Compute Optimized - Memory Optimized - Accelerated Computing - Storage Optimized - Instance Features - Measuring Instance Performance

Each of these types have a different set of families.

The AWS has the following naming convention like: - m5.2xlarge - m: instance class - 5: generation (AWS Improves them over time) - 2xlarge: the size within the instance class. The more the size, the more the CPU, memory etc.

EC2 Instance Types - General Purpose¶

Great for a diversity of workloads such as web servers or code repositories.
Balance between Compute, Memory, Networking.
In this course, we will be using the t2.micro which is a General Purpose EC2 instance.

EC2 Instance Types - Compute Optimized¶

Great for compute-intensive tasks that require high performance processors:
- Batch processing workloads
- Media transcoding
- High performance web servers
- High performance computing (HPC)
- Scientific modeling & machine learning
- Dedicated gaming servers

EC2 Instance Types - Memory Optimized¶

Fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory.
Use cases:
- High performance, relational/non-relational databases
- Distributed web scale cache stores
- In-memory databases optimized for BI (Business Intelligence)
- Applications performing real-time processing on big unstructured data

EC2 Instance Types - Storage Optimized¶

Great for storage-intensive tasks that require high, sequential read and write access to large data sets on local storage.
- High frequency online transaction processing (OLTP) systems
- Relationsl & NoSQL databases
- Cache for in-memory databases (for example, Redis)
- Data warehousing applications
- Distributed file systems

There is a great resource https://instances.vantage.sh/ that lists all of the instance types and you can compare them.