AWS EC2: Exploring Instance Types
What is EC2 Instance Types: EC2 Instance type determines the hardware configuration of the host computer on which the EC2 instance we are creating is going to be hosted. Each instance types offer different computing power, memory, storage which are grouped together in different instance families. (Please check all the images while reading).
How to determine which instance type to use: It depends upon the application requirements which is going to be running on the ec2 instance.
Instance types are optimized to fit different use cases and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications.
We are asked to choose the instance type while creating an EC2 instance (Check the image below):
Instance types are filtered by various instance type families:
- General-purpose instances: name is defined with `prefix(generation_number).size` i.e. for t2.micro — General purpose second-generation micro instance. For general purpose instances, prefixes are t, m.
- Compute Optimized instances: Its name starts with
c.
- FPGA Instances: Field Programmable Gate Arrays: Its name begins with
f.
- GPU Instances: High GPU along with network performance for applications using graphical applications. Its name starts with
g.
- Machine Learning Instances: These are built on the custom processor built by AWS optimized for ML applications. Family prefix —
inf.
- Memory-Optimized Instances: These instances offer the lowest cost per Gb of memory running on instances among EC2 instances types. Used for running database applications i.e. Memchaed, Distributed cache, larger deployments of enterprise applications like SAP. The name begins with
x, m or z.
- Storage Optimized Instances: Name begins with
d, i or h. Used for running large-scale data processing systems or parallel processing systems.
Summary:
Official Documentation: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
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Notes: For developer associate certification, We don’t need to memorize all the instance types but for solution architect certification, it is important to know the instance types.
