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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.
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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:
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