EC2 Instance Types Comparison (and how to remember them)
AWS offers a range of EC2 instance types optimized for various purposes. It’s great that they provide so much variety, but of course, it means one more thing that you have to learn. It’s worth taking the time to do so, as ⅔ of IaaS spend goes toward compute — that’s a lot of EC2.
Check out a brief breakdown in this video, which also compares EC2 purchasing options. Check it out here:
Or, read on for a look into each of the AWS instance types. Remember that within each type, you’ll still need to choose the AWS instance sizes that suit your specific needs. Additionally, older generations within each instance types are available for purchase — for example, c5 is the latest “c” instance, but c4 and c3 are still available — but as the newer types tend to perform better at a cheaper price, you’ll only want to use the older types if you have an AMI or other dependency. The differences matter for some users… but you probably already know who you are.
Note: a version of this blog was originally published in July 2018. It has been rewritten and updated for 2020. New EC2 instance types since our last writeup include A1, T3, z1d, high memory, R5, G4, and F1.
Quick EC2 Instance Info
This chart shows a quick summary of what we’ll cover. We’re including a brief description and mnemonic for each (hopefully helpful if you’re studying for an AWS certification!)
If you’ve taken a look at AWS training materials, you may have seen a couple of overall acronyms to remember all of these — perhaps Dr McGiFT Px or FIGHT Dr McPX. Whether these acronyms are useful at all is perhaps a point of discussion, but to ensure that all the instance types above are in your list, we suggest:
- Fight Czar MXPD
- Fright Camp DXZ
- March Gift PZXD
(and don’t forget high memory and Inf!)
General Purpose
These general purpose AWS EC2 instance types are a good place to start, particularly if you’re not sure what type to use. There are three general purpose types.
t instance type
The t3 family is a burstable instance type. If you have an application that needs to run with some basic CPU and memory usage, you can choose t3. It also works well if you have an application that gets used sometimes but not others. When the resource is idle, you’ll generate CPU credit, which you’ll utilize when the resource is used. It’s useful for things that come and go a lot, such as websites or development environments, and while generally inexpensive, make sure you understand how the CPU credits work before deploying these. There’s a little bit of math and they may not be as cheap as they look at first glance.
Make sure you also understand the difference between t3 and the older t2 — t3 are in “unlimited mode” by default, so instead of throttling down to baseline CPU when your instance runs out of credits, you pay for overages.
For each of the EC2 types we cover here, we’ll also add a mnemonic to help you remember the purpose of each instance type.
Mnemonic: t is for tiny or turbo.
m instance type
The m5 instance type is similar, but for more consistent workloads. It has a nice balance of CPU, memory, and disk. It’s not hard to see why almost half of EC2 workloads are on “m” instances. In addition to m5, you also have the option of m6g, which are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors, making them more cost-efficient. There’s also m5a, m5n, and m4 — most of which are safe to ignore unless you have a specific use case for one of the other processors besides m5’s Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 processors. If you aren’t sure what to choose, m5 is the most versatile of all the Amazon instance types.
Mnemonic: m is for main choice or happy medium.
a1 instance type
The a1 instance type was announced in late 2018 and can be a less expensive option than other EC2. They are suited for scale-out workloads such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, distributed data stores, and development environments. The instances are powered by Arm processors and suited for Arm-based workloads.
Mnemonic: a is for Arm processor
Compute Optimized
c instance type
The c5 instance type has a high ratio of compute/CPU versus memory. If you have a compute-intensive application — maybe scientific modelling, intensive machine learning, or multiplayer gaming — these instances are a good choice. There is also the c5d option, which is SSD-backed. See also the C5n which have up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth and increased memory compared to equivalent c5 instances. The c4 family is also still available.
Mnemonic: c is for compute (at least that one’s easy!)
Memory Optimized
r instance family
The r instance family is memory-optimized, which you might use for in-memory databases, real-time processing of unstructured big data, or Hadoop/Spark clusters. You can think of it as a kind of midpoint between the m5 and the x1e. In addition to r5, there are r5a which deliver lower cost per GiB memory and r5n which have higher bandwidth for applications that need improved network throughput and packet rate performance.
Mnemonic: r is for RAM.
x1 instance family
The x1 family has a much higher ratio of memory, so this is a good choice if you have a full in-memory application or a big data processing engine like Apache Spark or Presto. X1e are optimized for high-performance databases, in-memory databases, and other memory intensive enterprise applications.
Mnemonic: x is for xtreme, as in “xtreme RAM” seems to be generally accepted, but we think this is a bit weak. If you have any suggestions, comment below.
High Memory instance family
We’re not sure why these didn’t get an alphabet soup name like the rest of the AWS instances, but at least it’s easy to remember and understand. As you might guess, high memory instances run large in-memory databases, including production deployments of SAP HANA.
Mnemonic: we’ll leave this one up to you.
z1d instance family
The z1d instances combine high compute capacity with a high memory footprint. They have a sustained core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz, the fastest of AWS’s offerings. These are best for electronic design automation (EDA) and some relational database workloads with high per-core licensing costs.
Mnemonic: z is for zippy
Accelerated Computing
p instance type
If you need GPUs on your instances, p3 instances are a good choice. They are useful for video editing, and AWS also lists use cases of “computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, seismic analysis, speech recognition, autonomous vehicles” — so it’s fairly specialized. p2 instances are also available.
Mnemonic: p is for pictures (graphics).
Inf1 instance type
The Inf1 instances are a specialized EC2 type for machine learning inference applications, such as recommendation engines, forecasting, image and video analysis, advanced text analytics, document analysis, voice, conversational agents, translation, transcription, and fraud detection.
Mnemonic: inf is for inference
g instance type
The g instance type uses Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate graphics-intensive workloads, and also designed to accelerate machine learning inference. This could include adding metadata to an image, automated speech recognition, and language translation, as well as graphics workstations, video transcoding, and game streaming in the cloud.
g4 is the latest family, and g3 are available as well.
Mnemonic: g is for graphics or GPU
F1 instance type
f1 instances offer customizable hardware acceleration with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) — hence the “f”. Applications could include genomics research, financial analysis, and real-time video processing.
Mnemonic: f is for FPGA
Storage Optimize
i3 instance type
The i3 instance type is similar to h1, but it is SSD backed, so if you need an NVMe drive, choose this type. Use it for NoSQL databases, in-memory databases, Elasticsearch, and more. The i3en option has higher network bandwidth with Elastic Network Adapter (ENA)-based enhanced networking.
Mnemonic: i is for IOPS.
d2 instance type
d2 instances have an even higher ratio of disk to CPU and memory, which makes them a good fit for Massively Parallel Processing (MPP), MapReduce and Hadoop distributed computing, and similar applications.
Mnemonic: d is for dense.
h1 instance type
The h1 type is HDD backed, with a balance of compute and memory. You might use it for distributed file systems, network file systems, or data processing applications.
Mnemonic: h is for HDD.
What EC2 instance types should you use?
As AWS has continued to add options to EC2, there are now EC2 instance types for almost any application. If you have comparison questions around pricing, run them through the AWS monthly calculator. And if you don’t know, then generally starting with t3 or m5 is the way to go.
Looking for info on the other cloud providers?
Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on February 21, 2020.
