Amazon EC2 Instances
Amazon EC2 instances
are the fundamental building block for your computing needs in the AWS cloud. You
can think of instances as virtual servers that can run applications. Instances are created from an
Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and choosing an appropriate instance
type. An AMI is a template that contains a software configuration,
including an operating system, which defines
your operating environment. You can select an AMI provided by AWS,
our user community,
or on the
AWS Marketplace. You can also create and optionally
share your own AMIs. A single AMI can be used to launch one or thousands of instances.
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Selecting Instance Types
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. For the
best experience, you should launch on instance types that are
appropriate for your applications. You have the flexibility to choose
the combination of instance types most appropriate for your application
today, and then choose a different instance size as your business and
application needs change. To make it easier for you to select the best
option for your applications, Amazon EC2 instance types are grouped
together into families based on target application profiles. Below is a
quick guide to help you think about choosing the right
instance type.
Amazon EC2 instances are available in the following families:
General-purpose
This family includes the M1 and M3 instance types, and provides a
balance of compute,
memory, and network resources, and it is a good choice for many
applications. General-purpose
instances are recommended for small and mid-size databases, data
processing tasks that
require additional memory, caching fleets, and for running backend
servers for SAP, Microsoft SharePoint, and other enterprise
applications. M3 instances are the newest generation of general-purpose
instances, and give you the option
of a larger number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) that provide higher
performance.
M3 instances are recommended if you are seeking general purpose
instances
with demanding CPU requirements. M1 instances are the original
family of general-purpose
instances and provide the lowest cost options for running your
applications.
M1 instances are a great option if you are seeking moderate CPU
performance,
and a lower overall price.
- M1 and M3 popular use cases: Small and mid-size databases,
data processing, encoding, caching, SAP, Microsoft SharePoint and other enterprise applications.
Compute-optimized
This family includes the C1 and CC2 instance types and is optimized
for applications
that benefit from high compute power. Compute-optimized instances
have a higher
ratio of vCPUs to memory than other families and the lowest cost per
vCPU among all
Amazon EC2 instance types. We recommend compute-optimized instances
for running CPU-bound scale
out applications. Examples of such applications include high traffic
front end fleets,
on-demand batch processing, distributed analytics, web servers,
batch processing,
and high performance science and engineering applications. CC2
instances are the latest generation of compute-optimized
instances and provide the lowest cost CPU power relative to other
instance families.
CC2 instances also provide a number of advanced capabilities: Intel
Xeon E5-2670 processors; high core count (32 vCPUs); support for
cluster
networking. These capabilities allow you to cluster CC2 instances
into high
performance clusters capable of delivering hundreds of teraflops of
floating point
performance. C1 instances are the first generation of
compute-optimized instances; they are available in smaller sizes and
useful for massively scaled-out applications.
For example, customers have launched distributed clusters of
thousands of
c1.xlarge instances to encode videos or screen compound libraries to
design new
drugs.
- C1 and CC2 popular use cases: High-traffic web applications,
ad serving, batch processing, video encoding, distributed analytics, high-energy
physics, genome analysis, and computational fluid dynamics.
Memory-optimized
This family includes the M2 and CR1 instance types and is optimized
for memory-intensive
applications. Memory-optimized instances have the lowest cost per
GiB of RAM among Amazon EC2 instance types. We recommend
memory-optimized
instances for many database applications, for memcached and other
distributed caches,
and larger deployments of enterprise applications like SAP and
Microsoft SharePoint. CR1 instances are the latest generation of
memory-optimized
instances and provide even more memory (244 GiB), run on faster CPUs
(Intel Xeon
E5-2670 with NUMA support) compared to M2 instances, and support
cluster networking for bandwidth
intensive applications. M2 instances are available in smaller sizes,
and are an
excellent option for many memory-bound applications.
- M2 and CR1 popular use cases: High performance databases,
distributed memory caches, in-memory analytics, genome assembly and analysis, and
larger deployments of SAP, Microsoft SharePoint and other enterprise applications.
Storage-optimized
This family includes the HI1 and HS1 instance types, and provides you with direct-attached
storage options optimized for applications with specific disk I/O
and storage capacity requirements. Currently, there are two types of storage-optimized
instances. HI1 instances provide very fast SSD-backed instance
storage capable of supporting over 120,000 random read IOPS, and are optimized for
very high random I/O performance and low cost per IOPS. HS1 instances are optimized
for very high storage density, low storage cost, and high sequential I/O performance.
We recommend using HI1 instances for NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB which benefit
from very high random I/O performance and the low request latency of direct-attached
SSDs. HI1 instances are also an excellent choice for transactional systems that
can manage their own resiliency.
HS1 instances provide you with 48 TB of storage capacity across 24 hard disk
drives, high network performance, and offer throughput performance
of up to 2.6 GBps. We recommend HS1 instances for customers running large-scale
data warehouses or parallel file systems. For instance, if you are running an always-on Hadoop
cluster with 100s of terabytes of data, you should choose HS1 instances.
- HI1 popular use cases: NoSQL databases like Cassandra and
MongoDB, and scale out transactional databases.
- HS1 popular use cases: Data warehousing, Hadoop, and cluster
file systems.
Micro Instances
Micro instances are a very low-cost instance option, providing a
small amount of
CPU resources. Micro instances may opportunistically increase CPU
capacity in short
bursts when additional cycles are available. They are well suited
for lower throughput
applications and websites that require additional compute cycles
periodically, but are not appropriate for applications that require
sustained CPU performance.
- T1 popular use cases: Low traffic websites or blogs, small
administrative applications, bastion hosts, and free trials to explore EC2
functionality
GPU Instances
This family includes the CG1 instances and allows you to take advantage
of the parallel performance of NVidia Tesla GPUs using the CUDA and OpenCL programming
models for GPGPU computing. GPU instances also provide high CPU capabilities and
support cluster networking.
- CG1 popular use cases: Computational chemistry, rendering,
financial modeling, and engineering design.
We recommend that you select the instance type that is most
appropriate for your workload profile and scale, and then change your
instance type if your application's requirements change. In all cases,
we strongly recommend application profiling and load testing. The
availability of multiple instance types, combined with features like
EBS-optimization and cluster networking allow applications to be
optimized for increased performance, improved application resilience,
and lower costs. In particular, you should evaluate the most important
performance metrics for your application. For applications that benefit
from a low
cost per CPU, we recommend choosing compute-optimized instances (C1
or CC2 instances). For applications that require the lowest cost per
GiB of memory, we recommend choosing memory-optimized instances (M2 or
CR1 instances). Additionally, we recommend that if you are running a
database, you should choose instances that support EBS-optimization or
instances that support cluster networking. For applications with high
inter-node network requirements, you should choose instances that
support cluster networking. Micro instances provide short-lived CPU
resources opportunistically and are not recommended for applications
that require sustained CPU performance.
For a complete list of instance families, sizes, and specifications of Amazon EC2
instance types please see
Amazon EC2 Instance Details
Instance Features
Amazon EC2 instances provide a number of additional features to help you deploy,
manage, and scale your applications.
Multiple storage options
Amazon EC2 allows you to choose between multiple storage options based on your requirements.
Amazon EBS
is a durable, block-level storage volume that you can attach to a
single, running Amazon EC2 instance. You can use Amazon EBS as a primary
storage device for data that requires frequent and granular updates.
For example, Amazon EBS is the recommended storage option when you run a
database on Amazon EC2. Amazon EBS volumes persist independently from
the running life of an Amazon EC2 instance. Once a volume is attached to
an instance you can use it like any other physical hard drive. Amazon
EBS provides two volume types: Standard volumes and Provisioned IOPS
volumes. They differ in performance characteristics and price, allowing
you to tailor your storage performance and cost to the needs of your
applications.
Standard volumes offer storage for applications with moderate or
bursty I/O requirements. Standard volumes deliver approximately 100 IOPS
on average with a best effort ability to burst to hundreds of IOPS.
Standard volumes are also well suited for use as boot volumes, where the
burst capability provides fast instance start-up times.
Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to deliver predictable, high
performance for I/O intensive workloads such as databases. With
Provisioned IOPS, you specify an IOPS rate when creating a volume, and
then Amazon EBS provisions that rate for the lifetime of the volume.
Amazon EBS currently supports up to 4000 IOPS per Provisioned IOPS
volume. You can stripe multiple volumes together to deliver thousands of
IOPS per Amazon EC2 instance to your application.
Many Amazon EC2 instances can also include storage from disks that
are physically attached to the host computer. This disk storage is
referred to as instance store. Instance store provides temporary
block-level storage for Amazon EC2 instances. The data on an instance
store volume persists only during the life of the associated Amazon EC2
instance.
In addition to block level storage via Amazon EBS or instance store,
you can also use Amazon S3 for highly durable, highly available object
storage. Learn more about Amazon EC2 storage options from the
Amazon EC2 documentation.
EBS-Optimized Instances
For a low, additional, hourly fee, you can launch selected Amazon
EC2 instances
types as EBS-optimized instances. EBS-optimized instances deliver
dedicated throughput
between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options for 500 Mbps and
1000 Mbps depending
on the instance type used. We recommend using Provisioned IOPS
volumes with EBS-optimized instances or instances that support cluster
networking for applications with high storage I/O requirements.
Cluster Networking
CC2, CR1, CG1, HI1, and HS1 instances support cluster networking. Instances launched into a
common cluster placement group are placed into a logical cluster that provides high-bandwidth,
low-latency networking between all instances in the cluster. Cluster networking
is ideal for high performance analytics systems and many science and engineering
applications, especially those using the MPI library standard for parallel
programming.
Dedicated Instances
Dedicated Instances
are Amazon EC2 instances that run on single-tenant hardware dedicated
to a single customer. They are ideal for workloads where corporate
policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be
physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that
belong to other customers. Dedicated Instances let you take full
advantage of the benefits of the AWS cloud – on-demand elastic
provisioning, pay only for what you use, all while ensuring that your
Amazon EC2 compute instances are isolated at the hardware level.
Measuring Instance Performance
Why should you measure instance performance?
Amazon EC2 allows you to provision a variety of instances types,
which provide different
combinations of CPU, memory, disk, and networking. Launching
new instances and running tests in parallel is easy, and we
recommend measuring the performance of applications to identify
appropriate instance types and validate application architecture. We
also recommend rigorous load/scale testing to ensure that your
applications can scale
as you intend.
Considerations for Amazon EC2 performance evaluation
Amazon EC2 provides you with a large number of options across ten
different instance types, each with one or more size options, organized
into six distinct instance families optimized for different types of
applications. We recommend that you assess the requirements of your
applications and select the appropriate instance family as a starting
point for application performance testing. You should start evaluating
the performance of your applications by (a) identifying how your
application needs compare to different instance families (e.g. is the
application compute-bound, memory-bound, etc.?), and (b) sizing your
workload to identify the appropriate instance size. There is no
substitute for measuring the performance of your full application since
application performance can be impacted by the underlying infrastructure
or
by software and architectural limitations. We recommend
application-level
testing, including the use of application profiling and load testing
tools and services.
Instance Types
The following table list the specifications for each Amazon EC2 Instance Type:
|
Instance Family
|
Instance Type
|
Processor Arch
|
vCPU
|
ECU
|
Memory (GiB)
|
Instance Storage (GB)
|
EBS-optimized Available
|
Network Performance
|
|
General purpose
|
m1.small
|
32-bit or
64-bit
|
1
|
1
|
1.7
|
1 x 160
|
-
|
Low
|
|
General purpose
|
m1.medium
|
32-bit or
64-bit
|
1
|
2
|
3.75
|
1 x 410
|
-
|
Moderate
|
|
General purpose
|
m1.large
|
64-bit
|
2
|
4
|
7.5
|
2 x 420
|
Yes |
Moderate
|
|
General purpose
|
m1.xlarge
|
64-bit
|
4
|
8
|
15
|
4 x 420
|
Yes
|
High
|
|
General purpose
|
m3.xlarge
|
64-bit
|
4
|
13
|
15
|
EBS only
|
Yes
|
Moderate
|
|
General purpose
|
m3.2xlarge
|
64-bit
|
8
|
26
|
30
|
EBS only
|
Yes
|
High
|
|
Compute optimized
|
c1.medium
|
32-bit or
64-bit
|
2
|
5
|
1.7
|
1 x 350
|
-
|
Moderate
|
|
Compute optimized
|
c1.xlarge
|
64-bit
|
8
|
20
|
7
|
4 x 420
|
Yes
|
High
|
|
Compute optimized
|
cc2.8xlarge
|
64-bit
|
32 *1
|
88
|
60.5
|
4 x 840
|
-
|
10 Gigabit *5
|
|
Memory optimized
|
m2.xlarge
|
64-bit
|
2
|
6.5
|
17.1
|
1 x 420
|
-
|
Moderate
|
|
Memory optimized
|
m2.2xlarge
|
64-bit
|
4
|
13
|
34.2
|
1 x 850
|
Yes
|
Moderate
|
|
Memory optimized
|
m2.4xlarge
|
64-bit
|
8
|
26
|
68.4
|
2 x 840
|
Yes
|
High
|
|
Memory optimized
|
cr1.8xlarge
|
64-bit
|
32 *1
|
88
|
244
|
2 x 120
SSD
|
-
|
10 Gigabit
*5
|
|
Storage optimized
|
hi1.4xlarge
|
64-bit
|
16
|
35
|
60.5
|
2 x 1,024
SSD*3
|
-
|
10 Gigabit
*5
|
|
Storage optimized
|
hs1.8xlarge
|
64-bit
|
16
|
35
|
117
|
24 x 2,048*4
|
-
|
10 Gigabit
*5
|
|
Micro instances
|
t1.micro
|
32-bit or
64-bit
|
1
|
Variable *6
|
0.615
|
EBS only
|
-
|
Very Low
|
|
GPU instances
|
cg1.4xlarge
|
64-bit
|
16 *2
|
33.5
|
22.5
|
2 x 840
|
-
|
10 Gigabit *5
|
*1 CC2 and CR1 Instances are backed by 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors,
eight-cores with hyperthreading
*2 CG1 Instances are backed by 2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core with hyperthread plus 2 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs
*3
HI1 Instances can deliver more than 120,000 4 KB random read IOPS and
between 10,000 and 85,000 4 KB random write IOPS (depending on active
logical block addressing span) to applications. The maximum sequential
throughput on is approximately 2 GB/s read and 1.1 GB/s write.
*4 HS1 Instances can deliver 2.4 GB/s of 2 MB sequential read performance and 2.6 GB/s of sequential write performance.
*5 Instances launched into the same cluster placement group are placed into a non-blocking 10 Gigabit ethernet network
*6 For more information on the Micro instances see the AWS documentation
