Compute: EC2
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EC2 allows you to get a complete computer in the cloud in a matter of seconds. The nice thing about EC2 is that the computer you get will be very similar to the computer you use to develop your software. If you can run your software on your computer, you can almost certainly run it on EC2 without any changes. This is one of EC2’s main advantages compared to other types of compute platforms (such as Lambda): you don’t have to adapt your application to your host.
Instance types
EC2 is a sophisticated service with dozens of options that you will likely never need. This is the result of the highly varied workloads and use cases serviced by EC2. Nevertheless, the defaults that EC2 comes with are good default choices, and the most consequential decision you will have to make is selecting an instance type. As of the time of writing, EC2 offers 256 different instance types, but they can be narrowed down to a few categories defined by what they’re optimized for:
- CPU
- Memory
- Network
- Storage
- etc.
with different instance sizes for each category.
A snapshot of some of the AWS EC2 latest generation General Purpose (GP) Instance types is shown in the below table.
| Instance Size | vCPU | Memory (GiB) | Instance Storage (GiB) | Network Bandwidth (Gbps) | EBS Bandwidth (Mbps) |
| m5.large | 2 | 8 | EBS-Only | Up to 10 |