Amazon EC2 instance type naming conventions - Amazon EC2
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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 instance family and instance size. The first position of the instance family indicates the series, for example c. The second position indicates the generation, for example 7. The third position indicates the options, for example gn. 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.
Series Options
  • 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

  • Z – High memory

  • a – AMD processors

  • b200 – Accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs

  • g – Amazon Graviton processors

  • i – Intel processors

  • m1ultra – Apple M1 Ultra chip

  • m2 – Apple M2 chip

  • m2pro – Apple M2 Pro chip

  • b – Block storage optimization

  • d – Instance store volumes

  • e – Extra storage (for storage optimized instance types), extra memory (for memory optimized instance types), or extra GPU memory (for accelerated computing instance types).

  • flex – Flex instance

  • n – Network and EBS optimized

  • q – Qualcomm inference accelerators

  • *tb – Amount of memory for high-memory instances (3 TiB to 32 TiB)

  • z – High CPU frequency