Rightsizing Recommendations

Choose the best options

AWS offers a broad variety of instances for EC2 and RDS, and smart organizations will be sure to match their workloads with the best instance type for the job. However, this might be more of a challenge than it seems, because we've been conditioned—and in some cases incentivized—to intentionally oversize our hardware and landscape for so long.

On one hand, we want to be sure that our instances are being fully used. On the other hand, we do not want our applications and services to fail or crash because they are under-resourced. This will likely require some analysis and comparison of the different options and their pricing.

Considering time is money when resources are priced by the hour, it might make more sense to use a more powerful instance that can power through a job in 15 minutes versus 60 minutes on a less powerful instance. However, that more powerful instance might incur more cost in those 15 minutes than a smaller instance in 60 minutes. Of course, if the service-level agreement we’re trying to meet is 20 minutes or less, that would also impact our decision.

In most cases, the value will be greatest when we pick an instance that best fits the use case. Here are some instance categories and their typical use cases: