EC2 instance Families 👨🏻👩🏻👧🏻👦🏻
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a service provided by AWS for computation. When selecting an instance choose an instance that best supports the application requirements in terms of memory, storage and compute.
The EC2 instance is divided into 5 types:
- General Purpose Instances:
General Purpose Instances is used for running an application where the requirements like compute, memory, storage and networking are equivalent. These types of instances are used for web servers, back-end applications and small and medium databases.
2. Compute Optimized Instances:
Compute Optimized Instances are used for compute-bound applications. Compute-optimized applications are ideal for high-performance web servers, compute-intensive applications servers, and dedicated gaming servers.
3. Memory Optimized Instances:
Memory-Optimized Instances are used for memory-bound applications. It is used to process large datasets of memory.
Suppose that you have a workload that requires large amounts of data to be preloaded before running an application. This scenario might be a high-performance database or a workload that involves performing real-time processing of a large amount of unstructured data.
In these types of use cases, consider using a memory-optimized instance. Memory-optimized instances enable you to run workloads with high memory needs and receive great performance.
4. Storage Optimized Instances:
Storage optimized instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage. Examples of workloads suitable for storage optimized instances include distributed file systems, data warehousing applications, and high-frequency online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.
You can think of input operations as data put into a system, such as records entered into a database. An output operation is data generated by a server. An example of output might be the analytics performed on the records in a database. If you have an application that has a high IOPS requirement, a storage optimized instance can provide better performance over other instance types not optimized for this kind of use case.
5. Accelerated Computing Instances:
Accelerated computing instances use hardware accelerators, or coprocessors, to perform some functions more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs. Examples of these functions include floating-point number calculations, graphics processing, and data pattern matching.