Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides a broad selection of instance types to accommodate a diverse mix of workloads. In this technical session, we provide an overview of the Amazon EC2 instance platform, key platform features, and the concept of instance generations. We dive into the current generation design choices of the different instance families, including the General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Storage Optimized, Memory Optimized, and GPU instance families. We also detail best practices and share performance tips for getting the most out of your Amazon EC2 instances.

1. November 12, 2014 | Las Vegas, NV
John Phillips, Product Manager, Amazon EC2
Anthony Liguori, Principal Engineer, Amazon EC2

3. • What is the EC2 instance platform and a
virtualization primer
• How to make the most of your EC2 instance
experience through the lens of three instance types
• How to think about the future of EC2 instances

5. EC2
EC2

6. Host Server
Hypervisor
Guest 1 Guest 2 Guest n

8. c3.large
Instance family
Instance generation
Instance size

15. Model vCPU CPU Credits
/ Hour
Memory
(GiB)
Storage
t2.micro 1 6 1 EBS Only
t2.small 1 12 2 EBS Only
t2.medium 2 24 4 EBS Only

16. http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/low-cost-
burstable-ec2-instances/
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t2/

17. Baseline Rate
Credit
Balance
Burst
Rate

21. Model vCPU Memory
(GiB)
Storage Read IOPS Write IOPS
i2.xlarge 4 30.5 1 x 800 SSD 35,000 35,000
i2.2xlarge 8 61 2 x 800 SSD 75,000 75,000
i2.4xlarge 16 122 4 x 800 SSD 175,000 155,000
i2.8xlarge 32 244 8 x 800 SSD 365,000 315,000

23. read(fd, buffer, BLOCK_SIZE)

24. read(fd, buffer, BLOCK_SIZE)

30. Model vCPU Memory (GiB) Storage (GB)
c3.large 2 3.75 2 x 16 SSD
c3.xlarge 4 7.5 2 x 40 SSD
c3.2xlarge 8 15 2 x 80 SSD
c3.4xlarge 16 30 2 x 160 SSD
c3.8xlarge 32 60 2 x 320 SSD

32. Kernel
Application
Kernel
Application
VMM
Application
VMM
Kernel
Bare Metal PV-HVM PV

37. EC2
EC2

38. http://bit.ly/awsevals