Hardware Information FAQ

Hardware Information

Q: What kind of hardware will my application stack run on?

Visit Amazon EC2 Instance Type for a list of EC2 instances available by region.

Q: How do I select the right instance type?

Amazon EC2 instances are grouped into 5 families: General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, Storage Optimized and Accelerated Computing instances. General Purpose Instances have memory to CPU ratios suitable for most general purpose applications and come with fixed performance (M5, M4) or burstable performance (T2); Compute Optimized instances (C5, C4) have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for scale out compute-intensive applications and High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads; Memory Optimized Instances (X1e, X1, R4) offer larger memory sizes for memory-intensive applications, including database and memory caching applications; Accelerating Computing instances (P3, P2, G3, F1) take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs for high performance computing and machine/deep learning; GPU Graphics instances (G3) offer high-performance 3D graphics capabilities for applications using OpenGL and DirectX; F1 instances deliver Xilinx FPGA-based reconfigurable computing; Storage Optimized Instances (H1, I3, D2) that provide very high, low latency, I/O capacity using SSD-based local instance storage for I/O-intensive applications, with D2 or H1, the dense-storage and HDD-storage instances, provide local high storage density and sequential I/O performance for data warehousing, Hadoop and other data-intensive applications. When choosing instance types, you should consider the characteristics of your application with regards to resource utilization (i.e. CPU, Memory, Storage) and select the optimal instance family and instance size.

Q: What is an “EC2 Compute Unit” and why did you introduce it?

Transitioning to a utility computing model fundamentally changes how developers have been trained to think about CPU resources. Instead of purchasing or leasing a particular processor to use for several months or years, you are renting capacity by the hour. Because Amazon EC2 is built on commodity hardware, over time there may be several different types of physical hardware underlying EC2 instances. Our goal is to provide a consistent amount of CPU capacity no matter what the actual underlying hardware.

Amazon EC2 uses a variety of measures to provide each instance with a consistent and predictable amount of CPU capacity. In order to make it easy for developers to compare CPU capacity between different instance types, we have defined an Amazon EC2 Compute Unit. The amount of CPU that is allocated to a particular instance is expressed in terms of these EC2 Compute Units. We use several benchmarks and tests to manage the consistency and predictability of the performance from an EC2 Compute Unit. The EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the relative measure of the integer processing power of an Amazon EC2 instance. Over time, we may add or substitute measures that go into the definition of an EC2 Compute Unit, if we find metrics that will give you a clearer picture of compute capacity.

Q: What is the regional availability of Amazon EC2 instance types?
For a list of all instances and regional availability, visit Amazon EC2 Pricing.