A Complete Guide to Amazon EC2 Instance Types and Their Use Cases
When it comes to leveraging Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), choosing the right instance type for your workload is crucial to optimize performance and cost-efficiency. AWS offers a wide range of EC2 instance types, each designed to meet specific use cases and application needs. This article will dive into the most common EC2 instance types and how to choose the right one for your application.
EC2 Instance Naming Convention
Before diving into the various instance categories, let’s break down AWS’s naming convention for EC2 instances:
For example, take m5.2xlarge:
- m: Represents the instance class, indicating the category of the instance (e.g., General Purpose, Compute Optimized).
- 5: Denotes the generation of the instance. AWS frequently updates instances with newer hardware.
- 2xlarge: Refers to the size of the instance within the instance class. Sizes range from nano (smallest) to 16xlarge (largest), affecting compute power, memory, and storage.
Now that we understand the naming convention, let’s look at the main categories of EC2 instance types:
1. General Purpose Instances
General-purpose instances offer a balanced mix of compute, memory, and networking resources, making them versatile for a variety of workloads.
