🧩 Instance Naming Convention
Format
family.size
Examples
t3.micro
m7g.large
c7i.2xlarge
Size Scaling
nano → micro → small → medium → large → xlarge → 2xlarge → 16xlarge+
Instance Comparison Tool
🧠 Mental Model: The Big 6 EC2 Families
Think in this order — it mirrors how workloads usually evolve:
T → M → C → R → I → G / H
| Letter | Think of it as… | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| T | Tiny / Temporary | Burstable, cheap, dev & Free Tier |
| M | Medium / Main | Balanced, default choice |
| C | CPU | Compute-heavy workloads |
| R | RAM | Memory-heavy workloads |
| I | IO | Storage-heavy workloads |
| G / H | GPU / Hardcore | Acceleration & HPC |
Note
If you remember T-M-C-R-I-G/H, you remember ~90% of EC2 use cases.
🏷️ Instance Families Overview
Each EC2 instance family is optimized for a primary bottleneck:
- 🧮 CPU-bound workloads
- 🧠 Memory-bound workloads
- 💾 Storage / IO-bound workloads
- 🌐 Network or accelerator-bound workloads
📊 EC2 Instance Family Table
| Family | Subtype | Purpose | Series | 📌 Typical Use Cases | Latest Instances |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ⚖️ General Purpose | Fixed Performance | Balanced CPU, memory, networking | M7, M8, Mac2 | Web servers, dev workloads, small databases | M8g, M7i, M7i-flex, M7a, Mac2 (M2, M2 Pro) |
| ⚖️ General Purpose | Burstable | Low-cost, CPU credit–based bursting | T2, T3, T4g | Dev/test, Free Tier, low-traffic apps | T4g, T3, T3a |
| 🧮 Compute Optimized | Fixed Performance | High CPU, lower memory | C7, C8 | HPC, batch jobs, gaming servers | C8g, C7i, C7i-flex, C7a, C7gn, C7gd |
| 🧠 Memory Optimized | Fixed Performance | High memory capacity | R7, R8, U7 | In-memory DBs, analytics, SAP | R8g, R7i, R7a, R7iz, R7gd, U7i, U7in, U7inh |
| 💾 Storage Optimized | NVMe / Local SSD | Fast local storage | I4, I7, I8 | NoSQL, search, data warehousing | I8g, I7ie, I4g |
| 🌐 Accelerated Computing | GPU / AI / FPGA | Hardware-accelerated compute | G6, P5, F2, Trn2 | ML, video rendering, HPC | G6e, P5en, P5e, F2, Trn2, DL2q, Inf2 |
| 🚀 HPC | Tightly Coupled | High-speed interconnect workloads | HPC7 | CFD, seismic, weather modeling | Hpc7a, Hpc7g |