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A Closer Look at EC2 Instance Types

A Closer Look at EC2 Instance Types

Get an overview of the different EC2 instance types and instance classes.

In this lesson, we will learn a bit more about the different types of EC2 instances and their properties.

Let’s first take a look at the naming of EC2 instances:

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Naming scheme for EC2 instances
Naming scheme for EC2 instances

Instance classes

AWS offers different instance classes for different use cases. These are listed below:

  • General purpose
  • Compute optimized
  • Memory optimized
  • Accelerated computing
  • Storage optimized

General purpose

General purpose instances have a balanced performance regarding computing, memory, and networking. They are most commonly used and especially well suited for workloads like web servers.

The naming of general purpose instance classes is a bit inconsistent due to historic reasons. The following classes exist:

  • T: Relatively low-performance general purpose instances
  • M: High-performance general purpose instances.
  • A1: First generation of AWS Graviton (ARM-based processors)
  • Mac: Mac Mini based EC2 instances

Compute optimized

As the name suggests, compute optimized instances shift the balance toward computing performance for workloads like high-performance computing (HPC), scientific modeling, gaming, and similar workloads.

Compute optimized instances names all start with “C.”

Memory optimized

The memory optimized instance class shifts the balance toward memory, providing a large amount relative to the compute performance, for example, for data processing or in-memory databases.

Their naming is again a bit confusing, with different letters being used:

  • R: Mid-range memory
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