Amazon EC2 instance type specifications
Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases. Instance types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications. Each instance type includes one or more instance sizes, allowing you to scale your resources to the requirements of your target workload.
We group EC2 instance into the following categories:
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General purpose – Provide a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources. These instances are ideal for applications that use these resources in equal proportions, such as web servers and code repositories.
Burstable performance – The T instance family is also referred to as burstable performance instances. These instances provide a baseline CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline at any time. For more information, see Burstable performance instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.
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Compute optimized – Designed for compute intensive applications that benefit from high performance processors. These instances are ideal for batch processing workloads, media transcoding, high performance web servers, high performance computing (HPC), scientific modeling, dedicated gaming servers, ad server engines, and machine learning inference.
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Memory optimized – Designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory.
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Storage optimized – Designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to very large data sets on local storage. They are optimized to deliver tens of thousands of low-latency, random I/O operations per second (IOPS) to applications.
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Accelerated computing – Use hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform functions, such as floating point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching, more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs.
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High-performance computing – Purpose built to offer the best price performance for running HPC workloads at scale on Amazon. These instances are ideal for applications that benefit from high-performance processors, such as large, complex simulations and deep learning workloads.
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Previous generation – Amazon offers previous generation instance types for users who have optimized their applications around them and have yet to upgrade. We encourage you to use current generation instance types to get the best performance, but we continue to support previous generation instance types.
To determine which instance types meet your requirements, such as supported Regions, compute resources, or storage resources, see Find an Amazon EC2 instance type.