EC2 Instance Types

Let's review the various EC2 instance types.

There are the high level types (general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, etc), but there are interesting variants within those as well.

Instance Types

Here are a the high-level instance types:

• General Purpose (T and M types, the most popular, and cheapest)
• Compute Optimized (CPUs - C types)
• Memory Optimized (RAM - R types)
• Accelerated (GPU and other - P, Inf, G, F, VT types)
• Storage Optimized (NVMe, fast EBS - I, D, H types)

Naming Convention:

There are also variations within instance types - they share the same naming conventions. For example, you may see a t3 type and t3a variation.

Here are the varations:

• a - AMD CPUs - cheaper than Intel CPUs, and not necessarily slower. I geneally recommend these.
• n - Increased networking performance
• d - NVMe ephemeral disks available
• g - Graviton2, ARM based CPUs. These are cheapest - I recommend them if you can use ARM
• z - Xeon processors, ideal for single-threaded applications
• b - Block storage (EBS) optimized