Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud as Amazon EC2 instances.

  • Imagine you are responsible for the architecture of your company’s resources and need to support new websites. With traditional on-premises resources, you have to do the following:

    • Spend money upfront to purchase hardware.
    • Wait for the servers to be delivered to you.
    • Install the servers in your physical data center.
    • Make all the necessary configurations.

  • By comparison, with an Amazon EC2 instance you can use a virtual server to run applications in the AWS Cloud.

    • You can provision and launch an Amazon EC2 instance within minutes.
    • You can stop using it when you have finished running a workload.
    • You pay only for the compute time you use when an instance is running, not when it is stopped or terminated.
    • You can save costs by paying only for server capacity that you need or want.

Amazon EC2 instance types

Amazon EC2 instance types are optimized for different tasks. When selecting an instance type, consider the specific needs of your workloads and applications. This might include requirements for compute, memory, or storage capabilities.

General purpose instances

  • General purpose instances provide a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources. You can use them for a variety of workloads, such as:

      - application servers
  - gaming servers
  - backend servers for enterprise
  - applications 
  - small and medium databases

    Suppose that you have an application in which the resource needs for compute, memory, and networking are roughly equivalent. You might consider running it on a general purpose instance because the application does not require optimization in any single resource area.

Compute optimized instances

  • Compute optimized instances are ideal for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors. Like general purpose instances, you can use compute optimized instances for workloads such as web, application, and gaming servers.

  • However, the difference is compute optimized applications are ideal for high-performance web servers, compute-intensive applications servers, and dedicated gaming servers. You can also use compute optimized instances for batch processing workloads that require processing many transactions in a single group.

Memory optimized instances

  • Memory optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large datasets in memory. In computing, memory is a temporary storage area. It holds all the data and instructions that a central processing unit (CPU) needs to be able to complete actions. Before a computer program or application is able to run, it is loaded from storage into memory. This preloading process gives the CPU direct access to the computer program.

  • 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.

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.

  • In computing, a hardware accelerator is a component that can expedite data processing. Accelerated computing instances are ideal for workloads such as graphics applications, game streaming, and application streaming.

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.

  • In computing, the term input/output operations per second (IOPS) is a metric that measures the performance of a storage device. It indicates how many different input or output operations a device can perform in one second. Storage optimized instances are designed to deliver tens of thousands of low-latency, random IOPS to applications.

  • 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.