Amazon EC2 instance type naming conventions

Amazon EC2 provides a variety of instance types so you can choose the type that best meets your requirements. Instance types are named based on their family, generation, processor family, additional capabilities, and size. The first position of the instance type name indicates the instance family, for example c. The second position indicates the instance generation, for example 7. The third position indicates the processor family, for example g. The remaining letters before the period indicate additional capabilities, such as instance store volumes. After the period (.) is the instance size, such as small or 4xlarge, or metal for bare metal instances.

The image shows the instance type c7gn.xlarge, with a label for each part of the instance name.

Instance families	Processor families	Additional capabilities
C – Compute optimized D – Dense storage F – FPGA G – Graphics intensive Hpc – High performance computing I – Storage optimized Im – Storage optimized (1 to 4 ratio of vCPU to memory) Is – Storage optimized (1 to 6 ratio of vCPU to memory) Inf – Amazon Inferentia M – General purpose Mac – macOS P – GPU accelerated R – Memory optimized T – Burstable performance Trn – Amazon Trainium U – High memory VT – Video transcoding X – Memory intensive	a – AMD processors g – Amazon Graviton processors i – Intel processors	b – Block storage optimization d – Instance store volumes e – Extra storage or memory flex – Flex instance n – Network and EBS optimized q – Qualcomm inference accelerators z – High performance

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Instance types

Specifications