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EC2 Instance Families and when to use

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Mrudul P.
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Table of contents

General Purpose Instance

Provides a balance of computing, memory and networking resources.

Use Case:

Ideal for web servers & code repositories

Compute Optimized

Ideal for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors

Use Case:

Well suited for --

  • Batch processing workloads

  • Media transcoding

  • High-performance computing (HPC)

  • Scientific modeling

  • Dedicated Gaming servers

  • Ad server engines

  • Machine learning inference

Memory Optimized

Designed for workloads that process large datasets in memory

Use Case:

Well suited for --

  • High-Performance Databases

  • Distributed web-scale in-memory caches

  • Mid-size in-memory databases

  • Real-Time big-data analytics

Accelerated Computing

Uses Hardware Accelerators or Coprocessors to perform functions such as floating-point number calculations, graphics processing or data pattern matching

Use Case:

  • Machine learning

  • HPC

  • Computational Fluid dynamics

  • Computational Finance

  • Seismic Analysis

  • Speech Recognition

  • Autonomous Vehicles

  • Drug Discovery

Storage Optimized

Designed for workloads that require high sequential read & write access to large datasets on local storage. They are optimized to deliver tens of thousands of low-latency random I/O operations per second (IOPS)

Use Case:

  • NoSQL databases

  • In-Memory databases

  • Scale-out transactional databases

  • Data warehousing

  • Elasticsearch & Analytics

HPC Optimized

Designed to offer the best price for running HPC workloads at scale

Use Case:

  • Large, complex simulations and deep learning workloads
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