AWS offers multiple generations and processor options of the Amazon EC2 instance types to fulfill your application’s CPU, Memory, and IO requirements with varying costs.
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The EC2 instances are classified into instance families to help you pick the right instance type based on your application’s requirements:
- General Purpose (m) – provides balance between compute and memory configurations. It also provides Burstable Performance (t) instances with the ability to burst above the baseline vCPU for a limited time and Apple Macintosh (mac) instances.
- Compute Optimized (c) – provides high performance processors to fulfill heavy computing needs of your applications.
- Accelerated Computing (g,p,f) – provides co-processors to help your application perform floating point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching.
- Storage Optimized (d,h,i) – provides local storage with high IOPS for applications that process large data sets on local storage.
- Memory Optimized (r,u,x,z) – provides high memory configuration for workloads that process large data sets in memory.
A few of the EC2 instance types also come with an option to choose the processor from different vendors, like Amazon Graviton, AMD, Intel.
References
- Amazon EC2 Instance Types – Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). Amazon Web Services, Inc. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/