What are the AWS EC2 Instance Types? and And the Princing of it.

The AWS instance determines the underlying hardware of the instances which are launched.

Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute is shortly called AWS EC2 which is probably a web service that delivers secured and resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is mostly designed to make out the web-scale cloud computing for the developers with ease. It is a very simple web service interface that allows one to obtain and configure the required capacity with minimal friction.


AWS EC2 is here to deliver a wide range of instance types that are probably optimized to fit various use cases. All the EC2 instance types have come up with various combinations like CPU, Storage, Memory and other networking capacities. It also gives flexibility in selecting the right mix of resources for respective applications.


For each and every instance, Amazon EC2 provides a predictable and consistent amount of CPU capacity without any need for hardware. So that you can easily develop applications with ease. It even allows you to deploy applications faster. AWS EC2 helps you in managing and launching the virtual servers according to your requirements and provides high security, network, and manages storage process.

What are the Types of EC2 Instances?

Amazon has come up with a wide range of Instances that are designed to fulfill the wide variety of needs of an organization. We have listed different AWS EC2 instance

• General Purpose Instances - A1,T2, M5, M4, M3

• Computer Optimized Instances - C5, C4, C3

• Memory Optimized Instances - X1, R4, R3

• Accelerated Computing Instances - P3, P2, G3, F1

• Storage Optimized Instances - I3

• Dense Storage Instances - D2

General-purpose Instances

General-purpose instances provide a balance among compute, memory, and networking resources, and they can be used for a variety of workloads.

A1 Instances

A1 instances are used in applications that work in synchrony with the Arm ecosystem and are suitable for scale-out workloads. They are suitable for these applications:

• Web servers
  
• Containerized microservices
  
• Caching fleets
  
• Distributed data stores
  
• Applications that require the Arm instruction set

M5, M5a, and M5d Instances

These instances offer a balance among compute, memory, and networking resources providing an ideal cloud design. It could be used for a wide range of applications. M5 instances are well-suited for the following applications:

• Web and application servers
  
• Small and medium databases
  
• Gaming servers
  
• Caching fleets

T2 and T3 Instances

These instances provide clock up or down of CPU performance. These instances are well-suited for the following applications:

• Websites and web applications
  
• Code repositories
  
• Development, build, test, and staging environments
  
• Microservices

Compute-optimized Instances

These instances are useful for compute-dependent applications that need high-performance processors. They are well suited for the following applications:

• Batch processing workloads
  
• High-performance web servers
  
• High-performance computing (HPC)
  
• Scientific modeling
  
• Dedicated gaming servers and ad serving engines

C5, C4, and C5n are the instances under this category.

Memory-optimized Instances

These instances are for delivering fast performance for processing large data sets in memory.

R4, R5, R5a, and R5d instances are memory optimized.

These instances can be used in these following applications:

• High-performance, relational (MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, etc.) databases
  
• Applications which process real-time big data sets (financial services, Hadoop/Spark clusters, etc.)

Accelerated Computing Instances

These instances are the latest gen general-purpose instances, and they provide an accelerated performance when the CPU clock rate increases.

• P3, P2, G3, and F1 are instances for accelerated computing.
  
• P3 and P2 are general-purpose instances.
  
• G3 is for graphic-intensive applications.

Storage-optimized Instances

Storage-optimized instances are designed for workloads that contain very large data sets which has to be written in memory and require high, sequential read and write access.


D2 instances feature up to 48 TB of HDD-based local storage and offer the lowest price-per-disk throughput performance on Amazon EC2.


H1 instances provide a balance between compute and memory and features up to 16 TB of HDD-based local storage which delivers high-disk throughput.


I3 instances provide Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD-backed instance storage optimized for low latency, very high random I/O performance, high-sequential read throughput, and high IOPS at a low cost.

Dense Storage Instances

There are innumerable customers out there in the current market, where there would be other AWS users who want to store or process humongous amounts of data in the cloud. The Dense storage amazon EC2 instances are specifically designed to cater needs of such customers who will to store and process huge amounts of data – by providing them with additional options for processing multi-terabyte data sets.

D2 Instances

These storage optimized instances will offer up to 48TB by providing the huge disk by providing them at an affordable price for each disk type performance on AWS EC2 instances. The D2 instances are specifically designed for workloads which are greater sequential write and get the read access for large data storage. All these are well-suited for data warehouses, processing computing and Hadoop. These instances are optimized by EBS which offers dedicated block storage for your AWS account that ranges from 750 Mbps to 4000 Mbps with free usage. It also allows users to access them regularly by achieving great network traffic.


With all these features discussed, you can also launch multiple of these D2 instances in a placement group for high bandwidth low latency networking between the instances.


Following are also the features that come along with Amazon’s EC2 instances:

• Amazon EBS-Optimized by default
  
• Bringing Power to the people
  
• Available worldwide now
  
• Storage

AWS EC2 Pricing

Free Tier 750 hours of free usage up to one year is provided by AWS. Only t2.micro instance can be used on Linux and Windows AMIs.

On-demand Price:

m5.large	$0.096/hour
c5.large	$0.085/hour
r4.large	$0.133/hour

Data Transfer IN:

FREE from any region in the world

Data Transfer OUT:

From EC2 to:

S3, Glacier, DynamoDB, SES, and SQS in the same region	FREE
S3, Glacier, DynamoDB, SES, and SQS in the same region	$0.020/GB
EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, ELB, and ENI in the same AZ with private IP	FREE
EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, ELB, and ENI in the same AZ with public IP	$0.010/GB
EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, ELB, and ENI in different AZs	$0.010/GB

As EC2 in AWS is one of the first things one must do when they are starting with AWS but it won’t do any good if you don’t know how to create an EC2 instance. Now let us create an EC2 Instance to understand better.