Types of EC2 Instances
The following are the currently available instance types within AWS:
- General Purpose
- Compute Optimised
- Memory Optimised
- Accelerated Computing
- Storage Optimised
Each instance type has multiple options and have the following naming convention:
m2.2xlarge
where m is the instance class
5 is the generation
2xlarge represents the size within the instance class
General Purpose Instance Types are geared towards workloads such as code repositories or web servers and have a good balance between memory, computing power and networking.
Compute Optimised Instance Types are geared towards workloads which require processor intensive workloads such as media processing, batch processing, machine learning and gaming servers
Memory Optimised Instance Types are geared towards workloads which require a large memory resident dataset – think in memory BI databases, high performance databases, distributed caching systems
Storage Optimised Instance Types are geared towards workloads where storage is a factor such as databases, distributed file systems, OLTP systems and data warehousing applications