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AWS EC2 Instance Types Explained

Understanding the different types of EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services

Photo by Marcus Dall Col on Unsplash
Photo by Marcus Dall Col on Unsplash

Introduction

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service offering cloud compute capacity and is among the most popular offerings in Amazon Web Services. The service lets users rent virtual machines, store data on virtual drives, distribute load across different machines and scale services.

AWS offers different types of EC2 instance types which are optimised to fit several different use cases. Each instance type provides a different combination of memory, CPU, storage and networking that can be used in different contexts in order to suit the specific use case.

In today’s article we will discuss the four most basic EC2 instance types, namely General Purpose, Compute Optimised, Memory Optimised and Storage Optimised. Additionally, we will give a few example use-cases for which each instance type is most suitable for.


General Purpose

General purpose instances offer a balance of compute, memory and networking resource and are mostly suitable for a variety of diverse workloads such as code repositories or web servers.


Compute Optimized

Compute optimised instances are used for compute-intensive tasks that require from high-performance processing power. A few use-cases that could possibly benefit from compute optimised instances innclude

  • Scientific modeling & Machine Learning workflows
  • High Performance Computing (HPC)
  • Batch processing workloads
  • High performance web servers

Memory Optimized

Memory optimised instances are suitable for workloads that require fast performance in order to process large data sets in memory. Some use-cases that would benefit from memory optimised instances include:

  • Relational and non-relational databases
  • In-memory databases
  • Tasks performing real-time processing over big amounts of data

Storage Optimized

Finally, storage optimised instances are designed for storage-intensive tasks that require high sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage. These instances are optimised to deliver low-latency operations to applications running over them. A few use cases that would benefit from storage optimised instances are

  • Relational and NoSQL databases
  • Data Warehousing applications
  • Distributed File Systems
  • Cache for in-memory databases

Final Thoughts

In today’s article we discussed about the different EC2 instance types offered in Amazon Web Services. For more details about the specific instances you can refer to AWS product’s relevant section.

EC2 has a wide range of different EC2 instances and sometimes it may be time consuming when it comes to comparing many of them on Amazon’s website. The following website provides a very intuitive way for comparing EC2 instance metrics and pricing so make sure to check it out.

Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison


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