EC2 Instance Types Comparison

AWS offers a range of EC2 instance types optimized for various purposes. It’s great that they provide so much variety, but of course, it means one more thing that you have to learn.
We broke this down in a new video, which also compares EC2 purchasing options. Check it out here:
 
Or, read on for a look into each instance type. Remember that within each type, you’ll still need to choose instance sizes for your specific needs. Additionally, older generations within each instance types are available for purchase – for example, c5 is the latest “c” instance, but c4 and c3 are still available – but as the newer types tend to perform better at a cheaper price, you’ll only want to use the older types if you have an AMI or other dependency.
This image shows a quick summary of what we’ll cover:
ec2 instance types comparison chart with mnemonics
General Purpose
These general purpose EC2 instance types are a good place to start, particularly if you’re not sure what type to use. There are two general purpose types.
t2 instance type
The t2 family is a burstable instance type. If you have an application that needs to run with some basic CPU and memory usage, you can choose t2. It also works well if you have an application that gets used sometimes but not others. When the resource is idle, you’ll generate CPU credit, which you’ll utilize when the resource is used. It’s a cheaper option that’s useful for things that come and go a lot, such as websites or development environments.
We’ll also add a mnemonic to help you remember the purpose of each instance type.
Mnemonic: t is for tiny or turbo.
m5 instance type
The m5 instance type is similar, but for more consistent workloads. It has a nice balance of CPU, memory, and disk. It’s not hard to see why almost half of EC2 workloads are on “m” instances.
There’s also an m5d option, which uses solid state drives (SSD) for the instance storage.
Mnemonic: m is for main choice or happy medium.
Compute Optimized
c5 instance type
The c5 instance type has a high ratio of compute/CPU versus memory. If you have a compute-intensive application – maybe scientific modeling, intensive machine learning, or multiplayer gaming – these instances are a good choice. There is also the c5d option, which is SSD-backed.
Mnemonic: c is for compute (at least that one’s easy!)
Memory Optimized
r4 instance family
The r4 instance family is memory-optimized, which you might use for in-memory databases, real-time processing of unstructured big data, or Hadoop/Spark clusters. You can think of it as a kind of midpoint between the m5 and the x1e.
Mnemonic: r is for RAM.
x1e instance family
The x1e family has a much higher ratio of memory, so this is a good choice if you have a full in-memory application or a big data processing engine like Apache Spark or Presto.
Mnemonic: x is for xtreme, as in “xtreme RAM” seems to be generally accepted, but we think this is a bit weak. If you have any suggestions, comment below.
Accelerated Computing
p3 instance type
If you need GPUs on your instances, p3 instances are a good choice. They are useful for video editing, and AWS also lists use cases of “computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, seismic analysis, speech recognition, autonomous vehicles” – so it’s fairly specialized.
Mnemonic: p is for pictures (graphics).
Storage Optimized
h1 instance type
The h1 type is HDD backed, with a balance of compute and memory. You might use it for distributed file systems, network file systems, or data processing applications.
Mnemonic: h is for HDD.
i3 instance type
The i3 instance type is similar to h1, but it is SSD backed, so if you need an NVMe drive, choose this type. Use it for NoSQL databases, in-memory databases, Elasticsearch, and more.
Mnemonic: i is for IOPS.
d2 instance type
d2 instances have an even higher ratio of disk to CPU and memory, which makes them a good fit for Massively Parallel Processing (MPP), MapReduce and Hadoop distributed computing, and similar applications.
Mnemonic: d is for dense.
What EC2 instance types should you use?
As AWS has continued to add options to EC2, there are now EC2 instance types for almost any application. If you have comparison questions around pricing, run them through the AWS monthly calculator. And if you don’t know, then generally starting with t2 or m5 is the way to go.