General purpose instances

M5 and M5a instances

These instances provide an ideal cloud infrastructure, offering a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources for a broad range of applications that are deployed in the cloud. They are well-suited for the following:

• Small and midsize databases

• Data processing tasks that require additional memory

• Caching fleets

• Backend servers for SAP, Microsoft SharePoint, cluster computing, and other enterprise applications

M5zn

These instances are ideal for applications that benefit from extremely high single-thread performance, high throughput, and low latency networking. They are well-suited for the following:

• Gaming

• High performance computing

• Simulation modeling

M6i and M6id instances

These instances are well suited for general-purpose workloads such as the following:

• Application servers and web servers

• Microservices

• High performance computing

• App development

• Small and midsize databases

• Caching fleets

M6in and M6idn instances

These instances are well suited for network-intensive workloads such as the following:

• High-performance file systems

• Distributed web scale in-memory caches

• Caching fleets

• Real-time big data analytics

• Telco applications such as 5G User Plane Function (UPF)

T2, T3, and T3a instances

These instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst to a higher level when required by your workload. An Unlimited instance can sustain high CPU performance for any period of time whenever required. For more information, see Burstable performance instances. They are well-suited for the following:

• Websites and web applications

• Code repositories

• Development, build, test, and staging environments

• Microservices

AMD processors

• AMD EPYC 7000 series processors (AMD EPYC 7571): M5a, M5ad, T3a

• 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors (AMD EPYC 7R13): M6a

Intel processors

• Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Haswell E5-2676 v3 or Broadwell E5-2686 v4): M4, T2

• Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake 8175M or Cascade Lake 8259CL): M5, M5d, T3

• 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Cascade Lake 8259CL): M5n

• 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Cascade Lake 8252C): M5zn

• 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake 8375C): M6i, M6id

• Instances built on the Nitro System, M4, t2.large and larger, t3.large and larger, and t3a.large and larger instance types require 64-bit HVM AMIs. They have high-memory, and require a 64-bit operating system to take advantage of that capacity. HVM AMIs provide superior performance in comparison to paravirtual (PV) AMIs on high-memory instance types. In addition, you must use an HVM AMI to take advantage of enhanced networking.

• Instances built on the Nitro System have the following requirements:

  • NVMe drivers must be installed

  • Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) drivers must be installed

  The current Amazon Windows AMIs meet these requirements.

• To get the best performance from your M6i instances, ensure that they have ENA driver version 2.2.3 or later. Using an ENA driver earlier than version 2.0.0 with these instances causes network interface attachment failures. The following AMIs have a compatible ENA driver.

  • Amazon Windows AMI from May 2021 or later

• Instances built on the Nitro System support a maximum of 28 attachments, including network interfaces, EBS volumes, and NVMe instance store volumes. For more information, see Nitro System volume limits.

• Launching a bare metal instance boots the underlying server, which includes verifying all hardware and firmware components. This means that it can take 20 minutes from the time the instance enters the running state until it becomes available over the network.

• To attach or detach EBS volumes or secondary network interfaces from a bare metal instance requires PCIe native hotplug support.

• Bare metal instances use a PCI-based serial device rather than an I/O port-based serial device. The upstream Linux kernel and the latest Amazon Linux AMIs support this device. Bare metal instances also provide an ACPI SPCR table to enable the system to automatically use the PCI-based serial device. The latest Windows AMIs automatically use the PCI-based serial device.

• There is a limit on the total number of instances that you can launch in a Region, and there are additional limits on some instance types. For more information, see How many instances can I run in Amazon EC2? in the Amazon EC2 FAQ.